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HUNGARY: 



ITS CONSTITUTION AND ITS CATASTROPHE. 



HUNGARY: 



ITS CONSTITUTION AND ITS CATASTROPHE. 



BY QORVINUS. 



" Non illi nullam esse rempublicam 5 sed in ea, qua? esset, se esse principes. 



voluerunt.' 



Cic. 



LONDON: 
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 

1850. 



PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONF, STAMFORD STREET. 



"LB 



ADVERTISEMENT. 



The author of this inquiry has been induced to undertake 
it in consequence of the reiterated declarations in the face 
of Europe, on the part of the friends and adherents of 
M. Kossuth, that the Magyar Revolution was a movement 
in defence of the ancient Constitution of Hungary, and 
that it failed through the treachery of its principal mili- 
tary chief. The author's observation of events, as they 
occurred, had led him to an opposite conclusion, which a 
careful review of the evidence now accessible in official 
documents from Hungarian sources, and in the published 
correspondence of the Generals on either side, has fully 
confirmed. It is hoped that the following pages may serve 
to dispel a delusion, which it would be mischievous to 
Hungary itself to seek to perpetuate, as it would be in- 
excusable towards Europe. 

London, March 20, 1850. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

INTRODUCTION 9 

THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION 12 

THE LOCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTIES ... 13 

THE LAWS OF HUNGARY 25 

THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET . . . . .31 

THE PREROGATIVE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CROWN . . 47 

THE MONARCHY AND THE DYNASTIC SUCCESSION ... 52 

POLITICAL HISTORY SINCE 1843-4 58 

LEGISLATIVE SESSION OF 1847-8 63 

THE CROATIAN MOVEMENT 69 

THE REVOLUTION AND ITS PHASES 74 

INVASION OF THE AUSTRIAN TERRITORY AND BATTLE OF 

SCHWECHAT 78 

ABDICATION OF FERDINAND AND ACCESSION OF FRANCIS 

JOSEPH I. . . 78 

DISSENSIONS AMONGST THE HUNGARIAN LEADERS . . 81 

DEPOSITION OF THE HOUSE OF HAPSBURG-LORRAINE . . 83 

CONCLUSION OF THE WAR 84 

HE EUROPEAN QUESTION 89 






HUNGARY: 

ITS CONSTITUTION AND ITS CATASTROPHE. 



There are few pages in the records of the last two years 
which are so difficult to decipher, as those which relate to 
Hungary. It is generally admitted that the Diet of 1847-8 
opened under the most favourable auspices; and it is hardly too 
much to say, that if parties in that Diet had continued to be 
ruled by the spirit of temperate reform which ushered in its first 
sittings, the liberties of Hungary would have been enlarged and 
secured on a firm basis. But a spirit came over that Diet which 
no administrative reforms could satisfy — a spirit totally at variance 
with the genius of the Ancient Constitution — which established its 
ascendancy by abrogating that constitution, and sought to main- 
tain "it by sacrificing the monarchy. There can be no greater 
error than to suppose that the war of 1848-9 was a movement in 
defence of the time-honoured institutions, which had their roots 
in the laws of St. Stephen and Andreas II. A careful inquiry 
reveals two main elements in it, which were antagonistic to each 
other. In its earliest stage it was substantially a movement 
against the union between Hungary and the hereditary states of 
the House of Austria, and so far its spirit was aristocratic and 
national. But a foreign democratic element disclosed itself after 
the events of March, 1848, which was not fully developed until 
the revolutionary government retired from Pesth to Debreczin, 
when it became predominant in its councils, and gave a distinct 
character to the subsequent proceedings. The combined pre- 
sence of these two elements will explain many of the contradic- 
tions in the conduct of the leaders, and their apparent versa- 
tility in professing at one moment that they were fighting for the 

B 



10 HUNGARY. 

Ancient Constitution ; at another, for the laws of 1848 and the 
legitimate King Ferdinand V. ; at another, that they were ani- 
mated with the spirit of the Social and Democratic Republic; 
and at last, that the contest was exclusively against the House of 
Hapsburg-Lorraine. It is not very difficult to perceive the 
inconsistency of such opposite statements ; but it is not easy 
to understand how utterly irreconcileable the first and most 
plausible assertion was with the facts of the case, without some 
acquaintance with the Ancient Hungarian Constitution, which 
was perhaps more peculiar in itself, and more curiously interest- 
ing than its elder sister, the far-famed British constitution — that 
standing enigma to centralist statesmen. Such an assertion was 
specially adapted to conciliate the sympathies of England ; and 
it might have prevailed in the absence of more complete informa- 
tion, had not the striking fact of the party of the Mountain, in 
the French Chamber, supporting heartily the cause of the Hun- 
garian insurrection, been calculated to awaken suspicion. No 
order of things was ever more at variance with the principles of 
the Social and Democratic Republic than the Ancient Consti- 
tution of Hungary. It is therefore excusable for those who are 
interested in the progress of rational freedom, to make inquiry 
before they pass judgment in this matter ; and if the result of such 
inquiry should have led them to conclusions at variance with many 
notions in circulation on the subject, to make such conclusions 
known, that the truth of them may be more generally appreciated 
if they are correct, or the error, if they be erroneous, refuted. 

It is a bold assumption that the cause of the revolution was the 
cause of Hungary : it is very questionable whether, even in respect 
to the Magyar race, those persons who blazoned its name were in 
any sense its true representatives. This race is described by a 
recent Swiss traveller, in language which may be paraphrased, 
as ' loyal and generous, hospitable to an excess ; but, by the side 
of these and other manly qualities, exhibiting a dangerous leaning 
towards an enthusiasm without reflection, and a vivacity without 
calculation. The Magyar soon becomes warm, and he then gives 
way to the illusions of his fancy, and, with an ardour peculiar to 
himself, plunges in pursuit of the strangest chimeras.' The 
Magyar spirit still bears tjie stamp of its early origin : it is 



INTRODUCTION. 



11 



Oriental and Tatar. The civilization of Western Europe has 
made no impression upon it beyond its surface, and its effects 
present many features in common with those which have resulted 
in the Ottoman empire from the infiltration of European ideas 
since the reign of Selim III., and which do not extend beyond 
forms and words. One of the most patriotic Magyars, Count 
Stephen Szechenyi, in his last pamphlet against M. Kossuth, 
entitled ' The People of the East/ mentions that Hungary has 
never felt the influence of that civilizing element of the middle 
ages, the expression of which is found in the institutions of 
chivalry. The Magyars, it is true, have certain feelings peculiar 
to themselves and consonant to their institutions, but the Magyar 
is essentially a despot. It is especially in this particular that the 
revolutionary element of Western Europe is directly opposed to 
the national spirit of the Magyar race. 

The laws of a nation, it has been well said, form the most 
instructive portion of its history : in a similar manner its political 
institutions present the most complete picture of its daily life. 
It cannot therefore be otherwise than a subject of interest, at a 
period when so many extemporized state-systems have been 
rejected as practically worthless, to investigate the peculiarities of 
that remarkable constitution which has been handed down for 
eight centuries almost without the slightest change, and the 
unchangeable character of which bespeaks at once the Eastern 
origin of the people who have maintained it. It would not be a 
difficult task to describe in a few pages the leading features of a 
state where the central element is paramount both in government 
and administration, such as France, for instance, or Austria, 
inasmuch as in such cases it is not so much the operation, as the 
idea, of the system which requires to be delineated. But the 
anatomical skeleton of a state, whose local institutions constitute 
the main element of its life, would furnish but an imperfect 
notion of the play of its limbs and the motion of its parts. 
The reader is therefore invited to pursue, for a short time, rather 
an obscure and intricate path, under the assurance that the 
investigation through which he will be conducted, will furnish 
him with a safe clue amidst the complicated labyrinth of the 
later transactions. 

B 2 



12 HUNGARY. 



The Hungarian Constitution. 

It is not unusual to compare the order of things in Hungary 
with the feudal institutions of Western Europe; but it rather 
presents an image of antiquity than a counterpart to the recipro- 
cal obligation of the fief; or, if a parallel is to be sought out in 
the incidents of some existing system, we must turn our eyes to the 
disposition of landed property in India, where the relations of the 
zemindar (landholder) to the sovereign and the ryot (cultivator), 
are closely analogous to those which the nobles of Hungary bear to 
the king and the peasantry. Hungary, or the Land of the Magyars, 
consists of the territory which the victorious followers of Duke 
Arpad shared amongst themselves in the ninth century, after re- 
ducing into bondage the agricultural populations of Slavonic and 
Daco- Roman origin, which were settled in the rich alluvial plain 
of the Theiss, and on the banks of the Drave and the Danube. 
The dominant race seems to have distributed itself over this country 
in definite districts or camps (castra), and to have maintained its 
military organization for two centuries, under seven principal 
leaders, who were in their turn subordinate to an elective chief of 
the Arpadian family. The experience of discord, or weakness, or 
some other inconvenience incident to confederations, recommended 
in the eleventh century of our era the substitution of the rule of an 
individual for the existing octarchy; and accordingly Stephen, the 
representative of Duke Arpad, was elected, — and, concurrently 
adopting the Christian faith, became at once the King and the 
Apostle of Hungary. The external sanction of religion was not 
wanting on this occasion, and the Holy and Apostolic Crown, 
which St. Stephen received from Pope Silvester II., has continued 
to be religiously regarded by the Magyars as the emblem of their 
national sovereignty, and the palladium of the monarchy. 

St. Stephen appears to have been the Numa, as Arpad was 
the Romulus, of Hungary. The subdivision of the country into 
seven or more jurisdictions had doubtless given rise to a diversity 
of laws and customs, which it became necessary, on the establish- 
ment of the Monarchy, to reduce and digest into one uniform system. 
Accordingly the Code of St. Stephen was compiled, to which the 



THE HUNGARIAN CONSTITUTION. 13 

assent of the whole nation was pledged in their great assembly 
at Gran in 1016 a.d., and of which some unimportant fragments 
are still preserved, the provisions of which may remind the Eng- 
lish reader of the Dom Boc, or general code of Anglo-Saxon laws, 
attributed to King Alfred. What was the precise change which 
the original distribution of the nation into camps now underwent, 
is much disputed. It may suffice for our present purpose to say, 
that the early laws in the Corpus Juris Hungarici contemplate 
the dominant race, which constituted the nation in its political 
sense, as distributed into a certain number of counties (comitatus), 
over each of which a magistrate, nominated by the Crown, pre- 
sided under the title of Comes Supremus. This officer seems to 
have united in his own person the functions which the Lord- 
Lieutenant and the Sheriff separately exercise in English counties : 
he was individually invested with the executive authority of the law, 
whilst he exercised, collectively with the constituency assembled 
in their general congregation, an independent administration 
within the limits of the county. The nomination of the Comes 
Supremus on the part of the Crown has been superseded in 
thirteen counties by an hereditary tenure of the office ;* but the 
ancient order of nomination has continued to be observed in 
the remaining counties of Hungary proper (in number above 
thirty) ; as well as in five out of the six counties of Croatia and 
Slavonia — one of the former being hereditary in the family of 
Erdody. 

The Local Administration of the Counties. 

The organization of the Comitatus is the fundamental pecu- 
liarity of the Hungarian Constitution, and it deserves a careful 
examination from the student of public law, for its completeness 
almost neutralizes the influence of the central power, and imparts 
to the so-called monarchical state somewhat of the character of a 
confederation. Every noble, then, in the legal phraseology of 
Hungary, had a right to take part in the deliberations of the 

* This has however ceased in two instances, upon the extinction of the families of 
Kohary and Illeshazy, like the hereditary Shrievalty of Westmoreland, which is held 
to have lapsed upon the death of the last Earl of Thanet. 



14 HUNGARY. 

general assembly of the Comitates within which he was resi- 
dent ; or, to use expressions more familiar to the English reader, 
the county-constituency consisted originally of the aggregate 
body of resident nobles, or — as we should term them — gentry, 
combined with the beneficed clergy, who sat by virtue of their 
office. The gentry, on the other hand, were chiefly of Magyar 
extraction, the descendants of the Arpadian warriors who consti- 
tuted the original landholders; their ranks, however, had from 
time to time been recruited, as the Crown had the power of 
granting letters of nobility to individuals of the conquered races. 
At first, indeed, the grant of nobility seems to have been invari- 
ably attended with a grant of land, as a reward of services already 
performed ; but by degrees, as the nobles were the only portion 
of the population bound to serve the Crown in the field, being 
the servientes regis as distinguished from the villeins (rustici), 
who, on the other hand, were alone liable to taxation, the Crown 
came to grant simple letters of nobility to individuals, and even 
to whole communities, of which instances occur in the fifteenth 
century, as a kind of retainer for military service. Hence a 
distinction grew up between the nobilitas donativa and the nohi- 
litas armalitia, and hence, by the side of the rich landholders, 
we find a proletarian nobility enjoying the same political privi- 
leges. Some individuals of the latter class, however, are the 
pauperized descendants of landholders who have alienated their 
possessions, and these are popularly known as the One-House 
Nobles, or Half-Spurs. It would thus not be correct to suppose 
the nobles of Hungary to be exclusively Magyar, or the Magyars 
to be invariably noble. Peculiarity of race was not a necessary 
qualification for receiving letters of nobility, and the ranks of the 
privileged classes were reinforced both with the children of mixed 
marriages, and with the children of German or Slavonic parents 
adopted as heirs by nobles who had no offspring. In the case of 
mixed marriages, the privileges of a noble father passed as a matter 
of course to the children, but the privileges of a noble mother 
could not pass without a licence from the Crown. 

A further and more important distinction amongst the nobles 
was introduced in the sixteenth century, by the creation of the 
order of Magnates, or titled nobles, who thenceforth occupied a 



LOCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTIES. 15 

position in the State corresponding to that which the peer of the 
realm occupies in England : for although degrees of dignity in 
connexion with official station existed from the earliest time 
amongst the body of nobles, yet no dignity was heretofore heredi- 
tary. The title of Magnate, however, did not affect the position 
of the noble within the Comitatus, and he still continued to form 
part of the county-constituency. Meanwhile a new element, 
unknown to the original constitution, had been infused into the 
constituencies by the grant, on the part of the Crown, of the 
privileges of nobility to the Royal Free Towns in their corpo- 
rate capacity towards the end of the fourteenth century. There 
are fifty-two of these towns (forty-seven in Hungary Proper, and 
five in Croatia), though this number may be increased at the 
pleasure of the Sovereign — subject, however, to the confirmation 
of their Charters by the Diet — and they count as individual 
nobles, and in this character appear by deputy in the Assembly of 
the Comitatus, as well as in the Diet of the Kingdom. 

A writer whose work has recently issued from the Parisian 
press under the title of ' Autriche, Hongrie, et Turquie en 
1839-48/ gives the following account of the political organization 
of the Comitatus : — 

' The ancient collection of laws, the Tripartitum, declares that the 
nation, or body politic, is composed exclusively of nobles : accordingly, 
out of 550,000 nobles, the Magyars count 464,000, which leaves only 
86,000, with a" proportionately feeble influence, to the Sclaves, the 
Germans, and* the Wallachians. It is this corps of about half a mil- 
lion of Magyars, which keeps in check the Austrian government, the 
Sclaves, the Croats, and the Germans, which has gained great legisla- 
tive advantages over them during the last few years, and has at last 
openly declared war upon them. The nobles alone have votes in the 
fifty-five* counties, and they assemble every third year at a restauration 
to elect j their magistrates and the deputies to the Diet. The first 
Gespann, or honorary Chief Magistrate, is nominated by the Crown ; 

* M. Rey seems to include the three counties of Transylvania in this number. 

f The Crown had in theory a direct controlling influence over those elections, as 
the Constitution originally gave to it a free right of candidation ; but this right had 
been rendered a dead letter by the same decree of the Diet of 1723 which accepted 
the Pragmatic Sanction, as if the re-eligibility of the local administrative body was at 
that time held to be a proper counterpoise to an hereditary central power. 



16 HUNGARY. 

but the first and the second Vice-Gespann, the judges of the several 
districts and their sworn assessors, the notaries, the fiscal, and his 
assistants, the collectors of taxes, in a word every thing which concerns 
the administration, the tribunals, and the police, is entirely in the 
nomination of the nobles. The counties thus form distinct and almost 
independent governments, varying greatly in population and extent, 
for some of them count half a million of inhabitants. It is easy to 
imagine that the state of the roads, the public establishments, and the 
police, varies considerably in the several counties, according to the 
caprice or the means of each constituency. This system has preserved 
the political liberty of the body of nobles: official despotism could not 
penetrate within it, as it everywhere encountered points of resistance, 
but the comparison of the miserable state of Hungary with the flourish- 
ing condition of the other provinces of the monarchy, proves that the 
official despotism of an intellectual power is, in a material point of 
view, more beneficial to a country than the tyranny of a rude body of 
uneducated nobles.' — p. 123. 

The ordinary meetings of the Comitatus were held four times 
every year, or more frequently if necessary. At these meetings 
all the local business of the county was discussed and arranged ; 
roads and bridges were ordered to be made, taxes were assessed, 
contingencies of troops levied in conformity with the vote of the 
Diet, the salaries of the county officers provided for, and the 
price of corn and meat — the latter of which was a manorial 
monopoly — assized. The measures of law which were under 
consideration before the Diet were there likewise discussed, and 
instructions framed for the county delegates, and county grievances 
were debated, and remonstrances to the Diet prepared ; and com- 
munications instituted with other counties, not merely on local 
matters of mutual interest, but on the general affairs of the 
nation. In fact, the sphere of the political action of the county 
assemblies was so large, that a Hungarian Comitat would re- 
mind a stranger more of a province of the United Netherlands, 
or a Canton of Switzerland, than an administrative district of a 
monarchical state — with this remarkable distinction, that the po- 
litical and municipal privileges were in the hands of a few 
nobles (populus), whilst the political and municipal burdens were 
borne exclusively by the peasantry (misera plebs contribuens) . 

The privileges of nobles are well summed up by M. Rev, in. 



LOCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTIES. 17 

contrast to the burdens of the peasants, although he is not quite 
correct in regard to the respective values which he assigns to 
freehold and urbarial lands in the Banat : — 

' The rights of the nobles were as vast as a privileged race of con- 
querors could possibly enjoy, for they had all the advantages which the 
Spartans had over the Helots, with the exception of the obligation of 
the latter to provide food and clothing for their masters. The noble 
was inviolable in his person, his goods were not subject to sequestration 
at the suit of a creditor, nor could he be imprisoned upon any charge : 
the villein alone could be legally flogged, not so the noble : neither the 
noble himself nor his servants paid any tax, real or personal, to the 
king or the counties; and neither his horses nor his men could be 
required to work at the roads or the dykes. The peasant alone was 
the person who paid the tax termed " domestical," for the expenses of 
the Diet and the county administration. The peasant paid the salaries 
of the schoolmaster, the notary, the priest, the patrol. The peasant 
constructed and maintained, either with his money or his labour, the 
roads, bridges, churches, schools, public buildings, dykes, canals ; and 
it was the peasant and the townsman who drained the marshes, turned 
the course of rivers, &c. The peasants and the townspeople paid the 
war-tax and furnished recruits. In addition, the peasant gave up the 
ninth part of his revenue to his lord, the tenth to the Catholic clergy, 
fifty-two days' labour of himself and his team, besides extraordinary 
services, to his lord ; he supplied at all seasons horses at a nominal price 
to the officers of the county or their friends, furnished quarters to the 
soldiers, and yet, under all these burdens he was less bowed down than 
the peasants of Bohemia or Moravia, or more especially Galicia. The 
depreciation of land, owing to the burdens imposed upon it, was such, 
that in the rich Banat, a farm free from all charges was worth 200 
florins the arpent, whilst urbarial land, subject to the charges which 
attached to the peasant, was worth only 30 florins the arpent.' — p. 126. 

The connecting link between the central power and the local 
activity of the Comitatus was the Comes Supremus — the nominee, 
and, at the same time, the representative of the Crown, who, 
according to the spirit of the Golden Bull of King Andreas II. 
(anno 1222), was bound to discharge in person the duties of his 
office. Now the Bulla Aurea — the Magna Charta, as it has been 
termed, of the Hungarian nobles — had enacted that, with the 
exception of the Chief Justice (Judex Curiae Regiae), the High 
Treasurer (Tavernicorum Regalium M agister), the Ban of Croatia 



1 8 HUNGARY. 

and the Lord Chamberlain of the Queen, no functionary should 
be allowed to hold two appointments ; but notwithstanding this, 
the office of Comes Supremus was, through a series of centuries, 
united with other dignities, and the duties of it were abandoned 
for the most part to the Vice-Comes, who was an elective officer 
and represented the local interests. The Comes Supremus had, 
it is true, the right of presenting every third year three new can- 
didates to the electors for the office of Vice-Comes ; but the same 
person was always re-eligible, and by Article 56 of the Decree of 
1723, the Comes Supremus was positively bound to propose the 
outgoing Vice-Comes in addition to the three new candidates ; 
so that the same person, if re-elected, might continue to fill the 
office of Vice-Comes for life. It is obvious, that wherever the 
repeated re-election of a Viscount coincided with the non-residence 
of the Count, the local element would tend to encroach upon 
the central authority. The absence also of the most influential 
Magnate from his Comitatus would operate like the absence of 
the great proprietor from an Irish county — it would deprive 
property and station of their just influence, whilst it would leave 
the field open to the ambitious activity of inferior persons. 

M. Degerando — whose work, ( De l'Esprit Public en Hongrie,' 
may be regarded as the manifesto of the Opposition in the Hun- 
garian chambers before the events of March, 1848 — concurs in 
this view of the practical result : — • 

' The Count supreme is generally a great lord who possesses estates 
in the county, and whose ambition or patriotism induces him to take a 
part in public affairs. The law constitutes him the representative of 
the sovereign, but it abandons the "civil, political, and judicial adminis- 
tration to the Viscount, whom the congregation elects, and who, in 
fact, wields all the power. The Count supreme contents himself with 
appearing on the days of great assemblies, and at receptions and 
elections. He frequently travels in foreign countries, and whole 
months pass without those who are under his administration having a 
glimpse of him. By reason of these circumstances the administration 
in Hungary has escaped from the hands of the Austrian government, 
and fallen into those of the country itself — as the county assemblies 
really administer all affairs. Hence the independence of those Assem- 
blies, the bold speeches of the Electors, and the liberal instructions 
given to the Deputies.' — p. 253. 



LOCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTIES. 10 

The Government could not but be sensible of the inconvenience 
of the practice, and was anxious to restore the office of Comes 
Supremus to its ancient efficiency. It accordingly laid it down 
as a rule, that for the future it should not be accumulated with 
any other office ; but the custom of accumulation had become so 
inveterate, that many persons denounced this declaration of the 
Government as an arbitrary proceeding, in total disregard of the 
language of the 56th article of the decree of 1723, which pro- 
vided that they should be continually resident in their counties.* 

The Diet itself had for a long time concurred in the views of 
the Government, and had supported it by remonstrances addressed 
to the Crown against the absenteeism of the Comites Supremi. 
It was only of late, when sober notions of constitutional reform 
were abandoned for the suggestions of an exaggerated patriotism, 
that a numerous party in the Diet wished to render the Comes 
Supremus a purely honorary functionary, and to supersede him 
practically by the Vice-Comes. The Government, on the other 
hand, being unwilling to put the law into execution against old 
established dignitaries, and to enforce upon them a reluctant 
resignation of posts which gave them a seat in the chamber of 
Magnates, determined to revive the office of ' Administrators of 
Counties,' which was known of old to the Hungarian constitu- 
tion. The Vice-Comes was incompetent by law to perform some of 
the duties attached to the office of Comes Supremus, such as the 
direction of the triennial elections and the appointment of certain 
subordinate county-officers ; but the Administrator had full power 
to discharge these functions, and was in this respect the substitute 
directly contemplated by the constitution to maintain a counter- 
poise against the political strength of the local element. This 
measure of administrative reform was put into execution after the 
Diet of 1844. It must not be denied that the great number 
of Administrators nominated on this occasion might reasonably 



* Quandoquidem Supremi Comites illorum Comitatuum, quibus praeficiuntur, 
moderatores essent, ac tam politicorum et publicorum negotiorum quam etiam justitiae 
administrationis curam sibi principaliter commissam haberent; hinc ad praeviam suse 
Majestatis sacratissimae benignam resolutionem statuitur, ut observato quoad eorundem 
officia 36, an. 1536, articulo, nisi in publicis Regis et regni gervitiis praepediantur, in 
Comitatibus, quibus prcesunt, continuo resideant.'' 



20 HUNGARY. 

awaken a constitutional jealousy on the part of the Opposition as 
to the intention of the Government to supersede altogether the 
Comes Supremus, although the measure was declared to be only 
a transient arrangement and a temporary consequence of so many 
Comites Supremi being debarred from active business in their 
counties by age or infirmity, or some public function which de- 
tained them elsewhere. This jealousy, however, was fostered by 
the extreme party of the Opposition in the Diet, and was inflamed 
to such a degree that many persons did not hesitate to declare an 
office to be totally unconstitutional, the existence of which they 
had themselves witnessed in many parts of the country, e.g., in 
the counties of Presburg, Trentschin, Semplin, Tschongrad, 
Eisenburg, &c., and the exercise of which was practically familiar 
to several leading members of the Opposition in the chamber of 
Magnates. 

There were two other circumstances which must not be over- 
looked in estimating the importance of this step on the part of the 
Government, namely, that the electoral body had become most 
corrupt, and that corrupt elections necessarily entailed a corrupt 
system of administration on the part of the successful candidates. 
The Decree of 1723 had laid down the qualifications for county 
magistrates in such very vague and general terms,* that it came, 
by degrees, to be disregarded, and at last custom had abolished 
all property-qualifications ; yet the salaries of the county officers 
were so insignificant — varying from 807. in the case of the Vice- 
Comes to 10/. in the case of the Jurassor, the lowest member of 
the magisterial hierarchy — that a needy officer was often driven to 
illicit sources of gain to secure a maintenance. The evil was 
enormously increased in later times, when the elections were 
more fiercely and more unscrupulously contested, and when the 
office of Vice-Comes had become an object of ambition to the 
younger members of rich families. It was by no means unusual 
in later times for an election to cost 20,000 or 30,000 florins — 
even 1 00,000 florins has been named as the price of an office, 

* Vice-Comites, aliique Comitatuum Officiates sint de numero et statu verorum 
nobilium, possessionati, et disinteressa i, ac Dominis terrestribus ejusdem Comitatus 
nullatenus obligati, qui ad hujus-modi officia, ad sensum Artie. 70, an. 1548, cum 
conspiisu totius Comitatus eligantur.' 



LOCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTIES. 21 

the tenure of which did not extend beyond the third year, when 
the ordeal of a new election had to be repeated.* 

Mr. Paget, in his excellent work on Hungary and Transylvania, 
has not omitted to notice this blot : — 

1 The advantages resulting from this system of elected county 
officers, and their consequent responsibility to public opinion, are so 
striking that I need not point them out ; but some of its disadvantages 
may be less evident to those unacquainted with Hungary. In the first 
place, all these officers are elected by the people ; and be it recollected 
that in Hungarian that term excludes the peasantry, and from the short 
duration of their period of office they are naturally anxious to please 
those on whom their re-election depends ; and they are not therefore 
likely to be impartial in the administration of justice between electors 
and non-electors. But there is a still greater evil. From the payment, 
small as it is, by which these offices are accompanied, a number of 
needy men have been accustomed to seek them — I allude particularly 
to the office of Szolga-biro,t — and, from a mistaken kindness on the 
part of the electors, have not unfrequently succeeded. Now, although 
this may not prevail in all parts of Hungary — and I have certainly 
seen Szolga-birok very wealthy and respectable men — yet in others, 
where the spirit of the institution has been departed from and poor 
men have been appointed, the consequence has been that their poverty 
has laid them open to bribery in their quality as judges. To such an 
extent does this prevail in one part of the country that I have heard 
the people speak of bribing the Szolga-biro as a matter of course. I 
remember, in the district to which I allude, a Szolga-biro being pointed 
out to me as a most extraordinary man, because he administered justice 
fairly to the peasants without ever accepting even a present from them. 
This, however, is not altogether a fault of the institution; nothing but 

* In England the sheriff, when not hereditary, was an elective officer before the 
reign of Edward II., it being a very old custom for the inhabitants of each county 
(incolae territorii) to choose twelve electors, who nominated three persons, l ex quibus 
rex unum connrmabat.' But these elections becoming tumultuous, the statute 
9 Edw. II., st. 2, enacted that the sheriffs should be henceforth assigned by the chan- 
cellor, treasurer, and judges, as being persons in whom the same trust might safely be 
reposed. The City of London retains, by virtue of its charter, the old mode of ap- 
pointment. In the following reign the elective conservators of the peace in the several 
counties were superseded by justices of the peace, appointed, according to 34 Edw. III., 
ch. i., by the king's special commission under the great seal, as at the present day. 

f The Szolga-biro, literally judex nobilium, was the district judge. Every county 
was divided into separate districts, or processus, administered by individual judges, 
the chief of whom in point of order was styled Fo'-Szolga-Biro. 



22 HUNGARY. 

a high state of moral civilization in the country at large can ensure 
that strict honour in the judge, without which the best of laws can 
never ensure justice. 

" Nihil prosunt leges sine moribus." 

Something, perhaps, might be done by rendering the offices honorary, 
and so excluding the needy from them, or by raising the salary so high 
as to render its possessor beyond the power of slight temptations ; but 
nothing would be so likely to produce the desired effect as a determi- 
nation on the part of gentlemen of property and education to undertake 
the office of magistrate themselves, and so raise it, as with us, to be 
considered a mark of dignity and honour.' — vol. ii. p. 57. 

The revival of the office of Administrator excited great dissatis- 
faction amongst the county-constituencies ; and the grievance of 
the ' system of kreishauptmann (chiefs of circles), as it was termed 
by way of contempt, was the ( cheval de bataille' of the Opposi- 
tion in the Diet of 1847. There was, however, no real resem- 
blance between the hateful Kreishauptmann of the Emperor 
Joseph II., who was all-powerful in his district* without the 
congregation, and the Administrator, who was to act precisely in 
the constitutional sphere which the Comes Supremus filled with 
the county-congregation; but either it was found convenient to 
represent them as identical, or there was a lamentable mistake on 
the part of the assailants of the Government. Amongst the 
foremost and fiercest of these was M. Kossuth, the newly-elected 
deputy of the Comitatus of Pesth, whose speech on the occasion 
is reported, or rather paraphrased, by M. Degerando. A portion 
of it will serve to show the feverish character of the debate : — 

' Up to this time the Count supreme has been a dignitary of the 
country. The administrator who replaced him has been an officer of 
the county, nominated and paid by the county. At present it is wished 
to make of him a sort of French prefect, with this single although 
essential difference, that he is nominated not by a responsible minister, 
but by an invisible and intangible chancery, from which he receives 
secret instructions, to which he makes secret reports, and by which he 
may be arbitrarily dismissed. Surely such a magistrate under an irre- 

* Joseph II. destroyed the independent organization of the counties themselves, by 
combining them into ten provinces, over each of which a privy councillor presided, 
under the title of Commissary. 



LOCAL ADMINISTRATION OF THE COUNTIES. 23 

sponsible ministry bears a singular resemblance to a Bohemian or 
Galician Kreishauptmann. In addition, this prefect will be largely 
salaried by the government ; he will have under him a body of clerks ; 
he will dispose of the armed force ; he will usurp the right of nomina- 
ting the candidates at elections : he will have in hand, being master of 
considerable sums of money, ample means of intimidation and corrup- 
tion: he will, in a word, preside over the tribunals, and the life and 
fortune of the citizens will hang upon his nod. In good faith can it 
be said that such a magistrate is still a Hungarian dignitary, like the 
Count supreme used to be, and is he not rather a true Bohemian kreis- 
hauptmann, under whom our municipal system, the palladium of our 
political existence amidst the vicissitudes of a thousand years, will 
become a faint shadow ? In a short time this bastard system will no 
more resemble our national institutions than the postulaten landtag of 
Galicia recalls to mind in the present day the Diets of the Jagellons.' 
—p. 258. 

M. Kossuth's argument proceeds upon the assumption that the 
municipal system of the Comitatus would necessarily be affected 
by any measure which modified its political action ; but it is 
obvious that such an assumption is unwarranted, because the 
political action of the Comitatus would have been equally modified 
by the continual presence of the Comes Supremus, who was simi- 
larly the nominee of the Crown, and was subject to the same 
qualifications as the Administrator, yet, no one could reasonably 
object to the residence of the Comes Supremus. If indeed the 
presence of the representative of the Crown was really calculated 
to affect the existing municipal system of the counties, the legiti- 
mate inference was, that the existing order of things was not in 
accordance with the Constitution, inasmuch as the residence of 
the Count would have been strictly in accordance with the Con- 
stitution. But no arrangement which did not affect the con- 
stituent body of the Comitatus could affect its municipal system, 
inasmuch as the restaurations, or county meetings for the election 
of officers, were by law periodical, and the right of candidation 
on the part of the Crown was practically rendered nugatory, as 
already stated, by the Decree of 1723. The Crown, wishing to 
allay the apprehensions of the more reasonable, went so far as to 
send down to the Diet of 1847 a declaration expressly to the 
effect, that the new arrangement was not intended to supersede 



24 HUNGARY. 

the system of governing the counties through Comites Supremi, 
nor to interfere with their municipal or political privileges, but 
was bond fide meant to secure the residence of a constitutional 
president in each comitat, and thereby maintain the legitimate 
influence of the Crown. But party spirit had now become so 
violent, that the moderate section of the Opposition declined to 
meet the Government on this fair ground, and ultimately made 
common cause with the extreme party in a blind resistance to 
the measure altogether. 

There was one apparently serious objection to the system of 
governing the counties by Administrators, which M. Kossuth did 
not overlook, although he did not lay more stress upon it than 
upon the ideal grievance of the Administrator's bureau, which 
consisted in reality of his private secretary. It was that the 
Administrator could be removed at the pleasure of the Crown, 
whereas the Comes Supremus could not be removed without a 
judicial process. Yet the party of M. Kossuth no sooner accom- 
plished the Revolution of March, 1848, than they passed the fol- 
lowing law : ' In order to accommodate the system of "public admi- 
nistration to the principle of ministerial responsibility, it is enacted, 
that, with regard to all offices depending upon the nomination of the 
Government^ 1. §, Irremovability without a judicial sentence is 
restricted to the magistrates who discharge judicial functions .' — Art. 
29, 1848. This step at once furnishes an acknowledgment on 
the part of the opponents to the King's government in 1847, that 
they could not carry on the government themselves in 1848 with- 
out securing that very dependence of the political chiefs of the 
counties upon the central power, which they had but the year 
before denounced as fatal to ' the Palladium of a thousand years.' 

One of the most extraordinary powers which the Constitution 
allowed to the Comitatus was that of disputing the interpretation 
which the Crown gave to any law, and of suspending within the 
limits of the county the execution of it. This power of suspension 
was not restricted by law to any definite time, and it frequently 
happened that a county refused altogether to obey the ordinances 
of the central power, and so far stopped the general administration 
of the kingdom. In fact, the result of this practice was to render 
the law in many cases inoperative, for — as it frequently devolved 



THE LAWS OF HUNGARY. 25 

on the Crown to initiate the execution of a law — a county had 
only to dispute the interpretation which the Government had 
given to it, in order to elude its execution. Even when a law 
was clear, it was by no means an unusual practice to neglect it. 
A striking illustration of this fact occurs in reference to the 
Article « De nobilibus in fundo contributionali degentibus ' of 
the Decree of 1836, which obliged the nobles who were in the 
possession of lands originally occupied by peasants, and so subject 
to taxation, to pay certain taxes in respect of such lands. This 
law continued for ten years to be a dead letter in many of the 
counties, because the county magistrates were reluctant to dis- 
oblige their constituencies by enforcing it, and so endanger their 
own re-election. 

The Laws of Hungary. 

It may be convenient, before we proceed to consider the func- 
tions of the central power, to explain the nature of the Hungarian 
laws. They consisted of the written Decrees of the Diet, and 
the unwritten customs of the country, the latter being supple- 
mental to the former, and even in some cases modifying most 
essentially the written law. The customary Law of Hungary 
(jus consuetudinarium) was reduced into writing towards the end 
of the fifteenth century by Stephen Verboczy (Werbeuzus), and 
his work, the ' Tripartitum,' without having been expressly sanc- 
tioned by the Diet, has come to be considered one of the principal 
sources of public and private right, although many of the rules 
laid down by him have been modified by later customs, or indi- 
rectly abolished by subsequent decrees. The Decrees themselves 
of the Diets were not collected before 1584 a.d., when Zachary 
Mosaczy, Bishop of Neutra, compiled the ' Corpus Juris Hun- 
garici.' This collection, however, does not contain all the De- 
crees, inasmuch as several of the original Rolls are missing, or 
were not forthcoming during the lifetime of Mosaczy. Some of 
the latter have since been brought to light, having been recovered 
from the hands of the Turks, but not having been in force for so 
long a time, are obsolete, and possess merely an historical interest. 

The authority which the Hungarian constitution allowed to 
custom, combined with the ambiguous language of the Decrees 





26 



HUNGARY. 



themselves, has tended to make the law a perpetual snare both to 
the king and to the nobles. The ambiguity of the Decrees has 
partly resulted from the operation of natural causes, such as the 
antiquity of the Decrees themselves, the use of a dead language 
(the Latin), the change of meaning which many terms have un- 
dergone in the course of centuries, and a disputative subtlety of 
interpretation which characterizes the Magyar intellect ; but it is 
partly to be attributed to the contradictory influences of the 
oligarchic and popular elements, and of the monarchical and 
aristocratical pretensions, and more especially in later times to 
the opposing tendencies towards internal independence on the 
one hand, and on the other towards a closer union with the other 
states of the Austrian House. These antagonistic elements, being 
nearly equally balanced, were for the most part soothed into re- 
conciliation with one another by a system of compromise, which 
satisfied for the moment the exigencies of party strife, but de- 
prived the laws themselves of all value as definite standards of 
uniform political action. These various circumstances render it 
almost impossible to ascertain the strict letter of the law upon 
any question in dispute in Hungary, and therefore in regard to 
matters of Public Law and Political Right there is no country 
which requires more dispassionate discussion on the part of her 
own citizens, and a more cautious judgment on the part of 
strangers. The same circumstances will account for the embar- 
rassment of the Government and the extravagance of the Oppo- 
sition, and for the mutual reproaches of illegality and bad faith 
which have exasperated so unhappily political parties in Hungary 
since 1825, and have converted the salutary work of Reform into 
the destructive excesses of a Revolution. 

A few remarkable instances may be appropriately cited : first, 
of the ambiguity of laws ; secondly, of the contradiction of laws ; 
and, lastly, of the conflict between laws and customs. By the 
13th article of the decree of 1790, which establishes the order of 
proceeding in the Diet, it was provided, ' pertractatis debite pro- 
positionibus regiis cunctajwsta regni gravamina tollantur/ without 
explaining how the terms i duly ' and f just' ought to be 
interpreted. The vagueness of these expressions has furnished 
matter for perpetual dissension between those who maintained 



THE LAWS OF HUNGARY. 27 

that the propositions of the Government ought always to have 
precedence over all other business, and those who contended that 
if the grievances of the country had not been redressed in the 
former Diet, the subsequent Diet could not undertake the dis- 
cussion of the royal propositions. Again there was no law which 
specifically sanctioned the liberty of the press, or established a 
censorship over it. Two ancient laws of the sixteenth century 
spoke of the printing and circulation of Protestant calendars, but 
did not lay down any general regulation on the subject, and 
although often cited as leading to the inference that the press was 
at that time free, did not furnish any decisive evidence of the fact. 
In 1790, when a standing committee of the Diet was established, 
under the title of * Deputatio Regnicolaris/ to which Mr. Paget 
alludes in his chapter on the constitution of the Hungarian 
chambers, in order to review the general circumstances of the 
country, and to prepare new laws on several subjects, one of the 
articles of the Diet instructed them to prepare a bill to regulate 
the liberty of the press (libertas praeli), whilst another article 
gave them similar instructions for a bill respecting the censorship 
(censura librorum). No definite decree seems to have been 
passed as the result of the labours of the Committee on either of 
these subjects, but the fact of these double instructions being re- 
corded in the Statute Book is appealed to as evidence, on the one 
hand, of the liberty of the press being an acknowledged right ; on 
the other hand, of the censorship being a recognised institution. 
In a country where the method of proving the common law was 
by showing, as in England, that it had been the custom to observe 
it, it was perfectly impossible to untie this Gordian knot. Fur- 
ther, it was an admitted principle of the Constitution that in the 
Assembly of the Diet and at the meetings of the Comitatus the 
president should regard not the mere majority of votes, but the 
weight of the votes. • Vota non numerantur, sed ponderantur ' 
was an admitted axiom of ancient writers on Hungarian public 
law. It was also specifically provided by a law of Wladislaw II. 
art. 25, a°. 1495, that in all cases where the assembly was not 
unanimous, ' sanioris partis ratio haberetur,' and the Tripartitum 
(pars iii. tit. ii.) supplied the rule according to which the com- 
parison should be instituted: ' Sanior autem et potior pars ilia 

c 2 




28 HUNGARY. 

dicitur, in qua dignitate et scientia fuerint praestantiores atque 
notabiliores.' Yet notwithstanding the law spoke decisively on this 
point, a custom had grown up since 1820, first in the restaurations 
for the elections of the magistrates of the Comitatus, then in the 
county-congregations, where the ordinary business of adminis- 
tration was discussed, afterwards in the Lower House of the Diet, 
and, finally, in the Upper House, for the mere majority of votes 
to be regarded as decisive ; and in this manner the ancient spirit 
of the Hungarian constitution, as it were, evaporated. In the 
interval between 1820 and 1825 some excesses having taken 
place at the elections of the county-officers, the Emperor Francis, 
not keeping in mind the distinction which the Constitution recog- 
nised between political and private rights, and misled by the text 
of a law which established perfect. equality amongst the nobles in 
regard to private rights, issued an ordinance that whenever a 
diversity of opinion prevailed, a formal division should take place. 
The Diet of 1827 declared by an address to the Crown that this 
ordinance, which gave the power of deciding to the mere majority 
of numbers, was in direct contradiction to the law of the ' Vota 
Saniora,' and prayed that the royal ordinance should be abro- 
gated : yet a few years later the democratic element of the con- 
stituency, represented by the inferior nobles, had become so 
strong, and the modern custom had been so generally received, 
that whenever a president decided either in the Comitatus or in 
the Diet according to the ' Vota Saniora,' and not according to 
the mere majority of numbers, he was assailed with charges of 
violating the law and exercising arbitrary authority. The custom 
has thus gradually become established, and has at last totally 
superseded the written law. 

The decree of 1723, to which a more special reference will be 
made below, speaks of the provinces and kingdoms belonging to 
the crown of Hungary still to be recovered (recuperanda). One 
interpretation of the strange feat, which concludes the ceremonial 
of the coronation of the kings of Hungary, accords with this idea : 
namely, that when the king gallops up to the summit of the 
Konigsberg, and brandishes his sword towards the four quarters 
of the globe, he intimates his resolution to recover the ancient 
provinces of the crown of Hungary. This political idea has its 



THE LAWS OF HUNGARY. 29 

counterpart in civil matters, in the perpetual right of redemption 
(jus aviticitatis), which vests in the descendants of every pro- 
prietor who is obliged by circumstances to sell his estates. This 
right of redemption, however, may be barred by a prescription of 
thirty-two years ; but such a prescription cannot be established, if 
any heir to the reversion should have entered a protest before the 
expiration of that term at any of the loci credibiles, or privileged 
archives of registration. A protest, for instance, against the title 
of the proprietor of an estate in the north of Hungary, e. g. in 
the county of Saros, may be registered in the archives of the 
Convent of Martinsberg, in the county of Raab, or in those of 
the Chapter of Fiinfkirken, in the county of Baranya. Sup- 
posing, therefore, that the Count Szirmay or the Count Klobu- 
sitczky should wish to sell an estate in Saros, each being a large 
proprietor in that county, it would be necessary for the purchaser 
to search the archives of all the ecclesiastical chapters throughout 
Hungary, in case any protest should have been entered against 
the Count's title within the last thirty-two years, before he could 
be secure against a law-suit on the part of some outstanding 
claimant. An extreme case will best serve to illustrate the great 
practical inconvenience of this institution. Two cousins-german 
may have commenced a suit against each other concerning the 
right of succession to an estate under a will. After this suit has 
been in progress for several years a third party may intervene, 
and set up a claim of right prior to that of the testator, alleging 
that he represents a party who had a reversionary interest in the 
estate when it was purchased by the testator or his ancestors, and 
that the succession has been kept open by repeated renewals of a 
protest. A new suit may thus become engrafted on the original 
suit; and after this new question has been litigated for several 
years, a fourth party may step in and impeach the title of the 
intervener, on the ground that he represents a family to which 
the estate was originally granted, and which had not really become 
extinct, when the Crown took it as an escheat to the exchequer 
upon the supposed failure of heirs, and that the subsequent grant 
to the ancestor of the intervener is bad at law, as the earlier 
ancestral title has been kept alive by repeatedly renewed protests. 
At this stage of the suit, after two successive questions have been 




30 HUNGAllY. 

uselessly litigated for twenty or thirty years, it is competent for 
one of the original parties to acquire possession of this more 
ancient title by purchase, or marriage, or some compromise, and 
so defeat not only his original adversary, whose title under the 
will may have been clearer than his own, but also the intervener, 
who may have had an excellent title against both the original 
parties. 

These suits of * recovery ' (redintegratio aviticitatis) were for- 
tunately checked by the necessity of a claimant under ancestral 
right refunding to the intermediate possessor his purchase-money, 
together with the ameliorations. Hence the proverb ' bona 
solutio optima conditio ' — a good payment is the best title ; and 
Mr. Paget observes that the sum commonly entered in the title- 
deeds was the double of that really given. 

It can be easily imagined that suits of this kind might extend 
to such a length that the delays of the Court of Chancery, even in 
its most palmy days, would not bear a comparison with the 
proceedings in a Hungarian f processus juris.' As so many local 
registers had to be searched, this circumstance alone caused great 
delay in procuring the necessary documents, and it was by no 
means unusual for a suit, in which merely the title to an estate 
was disputed, to last for half a century, or even longer. There is, 
for instance, at this moment a suit between the Crown and the 
Esterhazy family with regard to the estate of Vaida-Hunyad, in 
Transylvania, into which several intricate questions of law have 
been imported, which has lasted nearly a century, and is not 
likely to be speedily determined. 

There is a well-known story of an Austrian officer paying a 
visit in the autumn to an Hungarian gentleman at his residence 
in a very retired part of the country, and commiserating him on 
the apparent absence of all rational amusement to beguile the 
dreariness of the approaching winter ; whereupon his host replied, 
with the usual Hungarian apostrophe ' Uram (Sir), you never 
made a greater mistake : I shall have abundance of amusement ; I 
have at least twenty law-suits, and they will keep me fully occu- 
pied all the winters of my life.' The luxuries of the law were 
thus nowhere more highly relished than in Hungary ; and it was, 
strange to say, regarded as a r feather in the cap ' of a petty noble 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET. .' 31 

to have a law-suit, as it furnished evidence of the antiquity of his 
family and the importance of his ancestral connexions. Scotch 
cousinship itself is outdone by the extent to which the ties of 
family are recognised in Hungary, as keeping up the link of the 
common reversionary interest of co-heirs (condividentes), which 
no lapse of time can destroy, provided only a cautela is appositely 
interposed. 

Another remarkable institution in Hungary was the processus 
repulsionis, which is so peculiar that the authority of M. Demian 
may be invoked to describe it :■<■*- 

' Pour bien l'entendre, il faut savoir que quand le juge se rend chez 
une partie pour mettre a execution une sentence prononcee contre elle, 
la partie declare ordinairement, qu'elle s'oppose a cette execution. Le 
juge est oblige de se retirer, et Ton recommence alors un autre proces 
pour prouver les raisons qu'on a eues de former opposition.' 

It is true that this right of repelling a judicial sentence was 
confined to proceedings which originated in the Supreme Court 
(Tabula Regia), and that it was substantially a right of appeal 
exercised in a rude and primitive way ; but it very often degene- 
rated into contempt for the law, and it was obviously regulated in 
an unskilful and dangerous manner. By sanctioning a direct 
opposition to the execution of the law, it positively defeated one of 
the great objects for which courts of law have been instituted. 

The Legislative Power op the Diet. 

Let us now proceed to consider the nature of the central 
power. The Diet of Hungary, in the olden time, was the 
muster in arms of the whole Hungarian nation (exercitus vocatus) . 
Its origin is described in the Tripartitum as coeval with the 
earliest distribution of the conquered lands amongst the fol- 
lowers of Duke Arpad, who were bound, on a signal being sent 
round to their camps, to assemble in arms at a given place, under 
pain of forfeiting their freedom. This signal was a sword stained 
with blood, which, like the Fiery Cross of the Scottish Gael, often 
made its circuit; and Verboczy attributes the fact of Magyars 
being found in a state of villeinage, to their ancestors having 
forfeited their privileges before the reign of St. Stephen. ' Nam 




32 HUNGARY. 

statutum et sancitum erat, ut transgressores ejuscemodi mandati, 
nisi rationabilem assignarent excusationem^ cultro media per 
viscera scinderentur, aut communem et perpetuam in servitutem 
redigerentur. Haec sanctio plurimos Hungarorum (ut praefer- 
tur) plebeiae perhibetur efTecisse conditionis.' Part i. tit. iii. — 
This provision of the early law gave rise most probably to the 
custom of the absent magnates appearing at the Diet by a mes- 
senger (nuntius), who was not a proxy (procurator) in the sense in 
which the word is applied in the House of Lords at Westminster, 
but rather the bearer of an excuse in behal f of the absentee. 

As might be supposed, the Great Congregation of the Hun- 
garian nation assembled in the open air, and the plain of the 
Rakos, near Pesth, was its favourite Champ de Mars. Its form 
has undergone many modifications, but historians do not agree as 
to the time or the occasion of them. We read in early times of 
so-called deliberative assemblies of 80,000 armed men, who de- 
cided all questions by acclamation ; which circumstance may serve 
to account for the vague language of the Decrees, which have the 
character rather of resolutions than of laws. As the nation in- 
creased in numbers the personal attendance of all its members 
came to be dispensed with, until at last the chief nobles or 
magnates and the higher clergy were exclusively required to 
attend in person, the inferior nobles and clergy being allowed to 
appear by delegates, elected by the corporations of the several 
counties and by the chapters. 

It is not unusual to speak of the Hungarian Diet as consist- 
ing of two Houses, each in its turn consisting of two Estates 
— the Upper House comprising the prelates and magnates, 
the Lower the delegates of the counties and those of the free 
towns; — but these expressions, though legally correct, are 
calculated to mislead the reader who is only conversant with 
the institutions of France or Great Britain, according to which 
the word ' Estate ' signifies a distinct political condition of life, 
and the division into two Houses is a substantial division of the 
Parliament. In Hungary, on the contrary, there was, strictly 
speaking, only one Estate, that of nobility — the clergy being 
noble by their office, the magnates and others by hereditary 
right, and the free towns by a fiction of law — and the two 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET. 33 

Chambers, in all cases where a difference of opinion arose be- 
tween them, resolved themselves into one House. Feszler, the 
most distinguished writer on the constitutional history of Hun- 
gary, refers this division of the Diet into two Houses, or, as they 
are strictly termed, Boards, e.g. the Tabula Procerum or Ordinum, 
and the Tabula Statuum, to the reign of Ferdinand I., anno 1562, 
others to that of Wladislaw II., anno 1493. Convenience most 
probably at first suggested an alteration, to which custom had 
given its sanction before the end of the 16th century, inasmuch as 
the law of 1608, by which the Diet was regulated down to the 
events of March, 1848, recognises the Council of Prelates and 
Magnates as sitting apart from the Regnicolae or Commons. 

As the sources of Hungarian law are not readily accessible, the 
Decree which embodies the constitution of the Diet is subjoined, 
in the form in which it occurs amongst the laws of Matthias II. 
in the Corpus Juris Hungarici.* 

* ' Statuitur ad omnes inaequalitates tollendas quinam sub nomine Statuum et 
Ordinum veniant et ad Comitia per regales (letters of summons) vocari ac vota habere 
debeant. 

* § 2. Cum Status et ordines ex quatuor conditionatis regnicolis, nempe Prselatis, 
Baronibus seu Magnatibus, Nobilibus, Liberis et Regiis Civitatibus constent — 

' § 3. Ideo Regnicolae decernunt, ne Sua Majestas prater hos ordines quempiam ad 
Generalem Regni diaetam evocet. 

* § 4. Praelatorum autem Statum esse volunt Episcopos capitulum cum Praeposito 
habentes ; ex tunc Episcopus in conventu Dominorum Praelatorum, et Baronum, 
Propositus una cum capitulo inter regnicolas (the Lower House) unam et conjunctam 
vocem, habeat. 

* § 5. Praepositi, qui nulli immediate Episcopatui subsunt, cum capitulo aeque con- 
junctam vocem habeant. 

' § 6. Praepositi et abbates infulati, qui jura possessionaria in regno tenent, inter 
regnicolas vocem unam habeant. 

' § 7. Generalis Ordinis Divi Pauli unam vocem habeat. 

' § 8. Universi Magnates et Barones praesentes in ccetu Praelatorum, Baronum, et 
Magnatum suum locum et sua vota habeant. 

* § 9. Absentium mintiis inter regnicolas locus et dignitas et vota ipsorum, more 
antiquitus consueto, post Comitatuum nuntios et Capitula tribuetur. 

' § 10. Liberas Civitates (quae juxta Vladislai Regis decretum vii. Articulum 3 
ordine recensentur) quod concernit, ut ese quoque in suis privilegiis et numero Statuum 
et Ordinum conserventur, dignum judicant regnicolae, quarum nuntii inter regnicolas 
locum et vota habeant dignum censent regnicolae. 

'§11. Reliquarum Liberarum Regiarum Civitatum Status] rejicitur ad emenda- 
tionem Decretorum. 

* § 12. Praeter hos ne alii (demptis illis, qui publicis regni officiis funguntur, utpote 
consiliarii nobiles, judices regni ordinarii, eorum vices gerentes, Protonotarii et jurati 
Tabulae suae Majestatis assessores), ad comitia generalia adhibeantur, decretum est/ 



34 HUNGARY. 

If this Decree be carefully examined, it will be evident that 
its object was to restrain the crown from enlarging the consti- 
tuency, as it had attempted to do by extending the electoral 
franchise to the corporations of free towns, which were royal 
peculiars. It contained no substitution of a representative for a 
direct system of common deliberation, inasmuch as the nuntii or 
delegates of the counties and other corporate bodies were fur- 
nished by their constituencies with instructions, from which they 
were not at liberty to depart. They were mere mandatories, like 
the deputies of the Swiss cantons, and their business was really 
to announce the results of the deliberations of the constituencies, 
and to maintain them before the Diet. Such an arrangement 
might be well adapted to protect the interests of the particular 
localities, but it was ill calculated to advance the welfare of the 
commonwealth, for the instructions of the counties often clashed 
with one another, and local views were naturally narrow views. 
Besides the delegates were not merely furnished with general 
instructions upon their election, but during the sitting of the 
Diet they corresponded constantly with their constituencies, who 
forthwith deliberated upon the measures announced to them as 
likely to be brought forward, and framed supplementary instruc- 
tions, any deviation from which was certain to entail the recall of 
the delegates. The congregations of the counties meanwhile 
played a part in relation to the Diet, very analogous to that 
which the political clubs of Paris filled in regard to the National 
Assembly. They were the real centres of deliberation, and 
every question of importance was decided by the counties before 
it came to be debated in the Diet. The debates of the delegates 
were thus mere declamations, without any practical bearing upon 
the decision of a question, and the Lower House was not so much 
a national council-chamber as a record-office, where the votes of 
fifty-two local Diets were registered. 

The constitution of the Lower House further presented more 
anomalies and inconsistencies than any existing institution of a 
like nature. According to the spirit of the law of 1608 all its 
members, with the exception of the delegates of certain free 
towns which had been incorporated subsequently to the reign of 
Wladislaw II., were severally entitled to votes, and, upon this 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET. 35 

supposition, the county delegates would have commanded rather 
less than a fourth of the votes. For the Lower House was 
made up of about the following proportions : — 98 delegates from 
the counties of Hungary and of Slavonia ; 2 envoys from Croatia ; 
104 delegates from royal free towns; 2 delegates from the 
privileged districts of Cumania and Iazygia ; 2 delegates from 
the Haiduck towns; 3 from other privileged districts; 52 dele- 
gates from Chapters ; 1 1 abbots and provosts ; and about 200 
delegates of absent magnates and widows of magnates ; to these 
must be added a few official persons connected with the Chan- 
cery and the Chamber of Finance, and 15 members of the High 
Courts of Justice, which, strange to say, kept judicial holiday, 
at least up to 1825, during the sittings of the Diet. Had the 
right of voting been co-extensive with the right of attendance, the 
members of the Lower House would have very fairly repre- 
sented all the great interests of the country, inasmuch as the in- 
habitants of the free towns did not belong to the class of nobles ; 
but the votes of the delegates of the towns were contested by the 
delegates of the counties, on the plausible ground that, as a 
county delegate represented the nobles of an entire county, his 
vote was entitled to far more weight than that of the delegate of a 
royal free town, which was only equivalent in law to a single 
noble ; and further, that the delegates of the towns, being elected 
by the common councils of the boroughs, were the nominees of 
close bodies which were under the immediate influence of the 
Crown. The result was, that after questions in the Lower House 
came to be settled, not by acclamation as in older times, but by 
actual division, a single collective vote was all that was allowed to 
the delegates of 52 free towns. The same measure was dealt 
out to the delegates of the chapters, while the messengers of the 
absent magnates and widows were not allowed to vote at all ; so 
that it resulted practically that the county delegates were masters 
of every division, and the Diet became the creature of the inferior 
nobles — a most untoward result, as will be hereafter seen, for the 
true interests of the country. 

The right of convoking and dissolving the Diet rested with the 
Crown, but it was imperative that a Diet should be summoned 
once in every three years, somewhere within the kingdom. The 



3G HUNGARY. 

occupation of Pestli by a Turkish Pasha during the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries led to the abandonment of Buda, where the 
Diet had been usually convoked for some time after it ceased to 
meet in the plain of the Rakos, and the adoption of Presburg as 
the legislative capital of Hungary. Of late, since the Crescent 
has been steadily on the wane, the considerations in favour of 
Presburg, in respect of its distance from the Turkish frontier 
and its proximity to Vienna, have materially diminished, and the 
sittings of the Diet have been transferred once more to Pesth, in 
compliance with its own prayer. 

The business of the two Houses always commenced with the 
reading of the royal propositions, which used to contain merely a 
sketch of the subjects which the Crown recommended for discus- 
sion. It was not until the session of 1847 that the Crown for 
the first time brought forward government- bills or projects of 
law. The members of the Diet thereupon gave in their grava- 
mina, which were generally complaints of infringements upon 
the privileges of the nobles; in fact, the received business of the 
Diet, when candidly examined, was not so much to make new 
laws as to maintain the old Magyar customs, and the normal state 
of both Houses was that of opposition to the king's government. 
Accordingly, before 1839 there was only one party in the Diet, 
the party which arrayed itself against the Crown. A committee 
was then appointed to which the so-called gravamina of the con- 
stituencies should be referred, in order that the chaff might be 
winnowed away, and the more serious grievances, selected as 
prcsferentialia, might be submitted in the Lower House. Mr. 
Paget, writing in 1838, states that f the Upper House has at 
present no power of bringing forward any measure, nor even 
of proposing amendments to those sent up from below.' The 
latter statement is not quite correct, as the Journals (Naplo). 
of the Diets will show ; but the former is at variance alike with 
theory and practice. It fails in theory, inasmuch as the right 
of petition must have been enjoyed in the great Assembly by 
the magnates equally as by the inferior nobles ; and originally 
no measures besides those proposed by the Crown could be 
introduced, except under a fiction of law as petitions. True it 
is that the Magnates were less full of complaints than the inferior 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET 37 

nobles; and therefore, as it was the invariable practice of the 
county-delegates to lay a list of grievances before the Crown, 
so much so that the Diet came to be popularly spoken of as the 
' salutare remedium gravaminum,' the Magnates might seem by 
desuetude to have forfeited their right of petition, as was in fact 
maintained by the Lower House. But the right of petition was 
too important to be given up without a struggle, and the Upper 
House has accordingly maintained in practice its right to initiate 
measures. It would have been an inconvenient result had the 
inferior nobles succeeded in depriving the Magnates of the ini- 
tiative, as the tax-imposing body would have had still less sympathy 
than at present with the tax-payers — the latter being for the most 
part the peasants of the Magnates. 

Allusion has been made to the evil tendencies of the encroach- 
ments of the inferior nobles on the state. This will be the more 
intelligible when it is stated that out of a constituency of less than 
600,000 nobles, which Hungary possesses, half at least, as far as 
may be gathered from imperfect statistical data, are paupers ! 
The class of pauper nobles is most abundant in the northern and 
western counties, in fact in the districts which did not fall into 
the hands of the Turks. They form a portion of the class 
which has been already alluded to as the One- House Nobles;* 
and the neighbourhood of Stuhlweissenburg, the ancient capital 
of St. Stephen, furnished a few years ago a remarkable specimen 
of them : — 

i I was wrong/ writes Mr. Paget, i in saying that there was nothing 
of interest (at Marton Vasar) save Count Brunswick's house, for a 
little farther on we observed several villages built under ground, the 
roof being the only part of the houses visible. We examined some of 
these burrows, for such they literally were, and found them mere holes 
cut in the ground, roofed in with straw, and entered by a sloping path, 
frequently without any other opening than the doorway and chimney, 
and as filthy and miserable as can well be imagined. What may seem 
to render the fact more extraordinary is, that one of the villages, we 

* The pauper nobles were nicknamed Plum-trees, as having a house and four plum- 
trees, Halfspurs, Sandal Nobles (Bottskoros), and, in modern times, Cortes. The 
origin of this latter term, as of our own party names Whig and Tory, cannot be accu- 
rately ascertained, but it is supposed to have come into use between 1820 and 1825, 
when the Cortes of Spain acquired an European celebrity. 



38 HUNGARY. 

were told, is inhabited entirely by noblemen, that is, by men who 
possess a small portion of land, pay no taxes to government, and are 
free from all seigneurial impositions. Let the reader keep this fact in 
mind, for it serves to show that it is not the amount of taxation which 
renders men poor and miserable, but the absence of the knowledge and 
desire of something better, and of the industry and thousand virtues to 
which that knowledge gives birth. It is but fair to say that I never 
saw such houses in any other part of Hungary : though I believe, dur- 
ing the Turkish war, a great part of the country was reduced to a 
similar state.' — vol. i. p. 256. 

The inconvenience of such a constituency will be strikingly 
apparent when we come to consider the cardinal privileges of the 
nobility, which were founded on the Golden Bull of Andreas II. 
These were — 1. Freedom from personal arrest until after conviction 
of a crime. 2. Subjection to no judge but their legally crowned 
king. 3. Perfect immunity from every species of taxation. It 
was the last of these privileges which rendered the pauper 
nobles so mischievous an element of the constituency. No 
abandonment of their privileges could be expected from men 
whose very existence depended on their maintenance of them. 
On the other hand, though the Crown had the power of enlarging 
the constituency by granting letters of nobility to the peasants, 
there was a paramount obstacle in the way of any systematic use 
of this power. The crown lost a tax-payer whenever it en- 
franchised a villein. There was no practical means therefore of 
recruiting the constituency on any large scale, yet this host of 
paupers formed the majority in the congregations of the counties, 
which returned the deputies to the Lower House, elected the 
county magistrates, and assessed both the general and local taxes 
upon the peasants. It was the representatives of such a con- 
stituency who denied votes to the deputies of the free towns and 
to the delegates of the chapters, and who contested the right of the 
Magnates to initiate laws. Let us imagine for a moment the 
English constitution to have been stereotyped in the mould of 
Magna Charta with its villeins regardant , and villeins in gross, 
and we shall have a state of things not ha so intolerable as the 
constitution of Hungary exhibited till within the last very few 
years, and for this single reason, that the relation of the Hun- 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET. 39 

garian peasants to the nobles was not a personal, but a corporate 
relation. 

In England, as is well known, villeinage had died away long 
before it was virtually abolished by the 12th of Charles II., inas- 
much as villeinage being a personal relation between individuals, 
the lord might manumit his villein, or the villein become ipso 
facto enfranchised by the extinction of the family of his lord. 
Villeinage thus formed no distinct order of the political economy. 
' No man,' at least in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as 
the author of the ' Middle Ages' justly observes, ' was a villein in 
the eye of the law, unless his master claimed him : to all others 
he was a freeman, and might acquire, dispose of, or sue for pro- 
perty without impediment.' But in Hungary the status of vil- 
leinage has continued to be a political condition ; and to the last 
it could only be changed by an act of the Crown, which granted 
nobility to the individual, or abolished by a decree of the Diet, 
which enfranchised the class. 

It must not, however, be supposed that the condition of the 
peasant in Hungary was socially so bad as that of the Spartan 
Helot or the Norman villein, to whom it is not unusual for 
writers to compare him. The Hungarian peasant was, it is true, 
a political slave, but he was not a social slave : and there is this 
great difference to be observed between the serf of modern 
Europe and the slave, that a sort of tacit contract regulates the 
relations between the serf and his master, whereas the slave is 
his master's chattel. The rights of the plebeians are certainly 
not recognised in the early Hungarian law-books, but the peasants 
gained in process of time considerable ground on their lords, through 
the kindness and benevolence of the nobles themselves ; and the 
common law, of which custom was the life in Hungary as in Eng- 
land, by degrees established certain prescriptions in their favour. 

The Hungarian peasants were originally attached to the soil 
(glebm ascripti), but in the early part of the fifteenth century a 
decree of the Diet declared them to be ' homines libera? transmi- 
grationisj and empowered them to transfer themselves from the 
place where they were born, with the consent of their lord. No 
further material change in their condition seems to have taken 
place until the sixteenth century, when the Diet, irritated by the 



40 HUNGARY. 

excesses committed by the peasants who took part in an unsuccess- 
ful insurrection under George Dosa,* the Wat Tyler of Hungary, 
reduced the entire body to their original condition of unmitigated 
serfage. The severity of this law was modified by Ferdinand I. 
and his immediate successors, but it was not until the middle of 
the eighteenth century that the rights of the peasants were placed 
on a firm basis by the Urbarium of Maria Theresa. Mr. Paget's 
account of this celebrated measure, the provisions of which are 
given by him at large, is perfectly trustworthy : — 

i In the Diet of 1764, the third and last held under Maria Theresa, 
the grievances of the peasants were most strongly urged on the atten- 
tion of the nobles, but no ameliorations were obtained : occupied with 
their own affairs, those of the weaker classes were delayed to some 
future period. The next year the natural consequences of the agitation 
of such a question, without any step being made towards its solution, 
were manifested in a rising of the discontented peasantry in several 
parts of the country, and in the commission of the usual outrages before 
the forces of the Government could allay the ferment. Taking ad- 
vantage of the alarm which these excesses had impressed upon the 
public mind, the great queen determined, by an act of arbitrary power, 
herself to apply the remedy to so crying an evil ; an act which, if it 
cannot be defended as strictly constitutional, will never want apologists 
among the friends of humanity. 

' The result of this determination was the celebrated Urbarium of 
Maria Theresa, the Magna Charta of the Hungarian peasantry. Partly 
a formal recognition of established customs, partly a grant of new 
rights, the importance of which was not at first perceived, this Urba- 
rium, though unsanctioned by the Diet, became virtually, and almost 
without opposition, the law of the land. After the death of Joseph, 
when the Diet was again called together, it was adopted provisionally 
till a more perfect one could be framed, and so it continued till 1835. 

( One of the chief grievances of the peasantry in the time of Maria 
Theresa was the heavy taxation, to which for some years they had 
been subject, and for which the almost constant wars in which the 
empire was engaged during this reign was a sufficient reason. The 
new Urbarium did not propose to lessen this burden ; but under the 
plea of rendering its pressure less irksome, and at the same time to 

* Baron Eotvbs, late Minister of Public Worship, published, in 1846, a very inte- 
resting novel on this period, entitled < Hungary in the Sixteenth Century.' His earlier 
novel, ' The Village Notary,' which gives a striking sketch of Hungarian municipal 
life, is well known. 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET. 41 

defend the peasant against the oppression of his lord, it declared him 
not only at liberty to quit his land when he chose, but conferred on 
him the right to retain it as long as he pleased, on the fulfilment of 
certain conditions. To enable him to support the taxation, he was 
endowed with a kind of joint property in the soil. 

' By this masterstroke of policy, one-half of the land in Hungary 
was rendered for ever taxable. It is known to the reader that the 
Hungarian noble pays no direct taxes, and that before this Urbarium 
the peasant had no right in the land ; so that, had it pleased the noble, 
he could at any time, not indeed have prevented the peasant paying 
tax, but have deprived him of the power of doing so by retaking the 
farm into his own occupation. The case, however, was now altered. 
It was simply declared that the landlord could not deprive the tenant 
of his land, and that the latter could bequeath it (or its usufruct, to be 
verbally correct) to his children ; so that, in fact, it became partially 
his property, subject only to certain conditions and restrictions of right/ 
—vol. i. p. 295. 

No further change in the law of landlord and tenant took place 
until the Diet of 1832-6, when a new Urbarium was proposed 
by the Crown, and accepted by the Diet, the object of which was 
to confer on the peasant a kind of 'tenant-right,' and to attach 
the liability of taxation to the property, and not to the person 
of the cultivator. The peasant was declared henceforth to have 
the right of buying and selling his investments and ameliorations 
with the usufruct of his land, subject to some restrictions as to 
the disposition of his property by will. The principle was now 
for the first time recognised of making the taxes a real charge, 
instead of a personal charge. It was the first step towards the 
abandonment, on the part of the nobles, of their personal exemp- 
tion from al] taxation ; for it was especially provided, that should 
a noble purchase peasants' land (or, as it was technically termed, 
urbarial land) it should continue subject to all the burdens of 
direct taxation to which it had been previously liable — with this 
exception, that he retained, in his character of nobleman, his 
hereditary exemption from having soldiers quartered upon him, 
and from supplying them with forage; to which justice perhaps 
entitled him, in consideration of his liability to serve the Crown 
in person in the field, without pay. 

In 1839 a new law was passed, giving to the peasant a right of 



42 HUNGARY. 

enfranchising his land by purchasing the fee; but although he 
was henceforth legally enabled to become a proprietor, the owner- 
ship of urbarial land did not carry with it any political rights. 
From this period there has been always a considerable difference 
of opinion between parties in the Diet ; the advocates of radical 
reform maintaining the necessity of passing a compulsory law by 
which the nobles should be obliged to sell the fee simple of their 
peasant lands at a fixed price, which would have been a measure 
somewhat analogous to a law for the compulsory enfranchisement 
of leaseholds in England; whilst the friends of temperate pro- 
gress have resisted this measure as unjust in principle, as well as 
uncalled for in practice ; there being no evidence before the Diet 
of the unwillingness of the nobles to enfranchise their peasant- 
lands at a fair price. The enfranchisement of peasant-lands has 
accordingly been allowed to follow its natural course,* until the 
events of March, 1848, at Presburg, precipitated everything into 
an abyss. For immediately after these events a measure was 
proposed in the Lower House of the Diet, in a most unconstitu- 
tional manner, ivithout any instructions from the congregations of 
the counties, and passed hastily through the Upper House at an 
extraordinary evening sitting, although the chief of the new cabinet 
(Count Louis Batthyanyi) admitted in the Upper House his own 
misgivings of the measure. f By this rash law, which violated 

* At the commencement of the session of 1847-48, both Houses had agreed to a com- 
mittee being appointed to consider the best means of more effectually promoting the 
general enfranchisement of peasant lands, in other words, the commutation of the ex- 
isting rent payable in labour (the Robot). 

f The ninth article of the Diet of 1848, adopting the propositions of the Batthyanyi- 
Kossiith ministry, decrees as follows : — 

* All labour-rents, tithes, and money-payments, in use on the basis of the Urbarium, 
and similar civil contracts, are for ever abolished after the publication of this law. 

' § 1. The legislature places the indemnity of the individual proprietors under the 
shield of the national honour. 

* § 2. His Majesty will submit to the next Diet, through his Hungarian ministry, a 

bill with regard to the indemnity to be granted to the proprietors, in such terms 
that they shall receive from the state the capital of their rents.' 
The twelfth article goes on to convert the urbarial rents into a charge upon the public 
debt. 

1 In consequence of labour-rents being abolished, it is enacted — 
< § 5. The ministry is instantly to issue to the proprietors State-bonds on account, 
for the value of their property. The Kammeral lands are assigned for the 
liquidation of the State-bonds ; and the ministry is empowered either to con- 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET. 43 

the rights of property without securing the political franchise to 
the peasant, the rents of the Urbarial lands were abolished at one 
sweep, with a naked promise of compensation to the proprietors. 
The compensation of course has not been made, but the measure 
of confiscation is complete. 

The decrees of the Diet of 1832-36, which enacted the Urba- 
rium of Francis II., constituted an entirely new epoch in the 
history of Hungary. It was not merely that it diminished in a 
material point of view the burdens of the peasant, and abolished 
many oppressive regulations of a vexatious character, but it gave 
him a new civil status. Hitherto the peasant had no right of 
action against his lord: he was subject to the jurisdiction of the 
Sedes Dominalis (court-baron), which could inflict corporeal 
punishment on a refractory villein. The new Urbarium, how- 
ever, restricted the jurisdiction of the lord's court to causes 
between peasant and peasant; and the Sedes Dominalis Urbarialis 
was expressly instituted for hearing all causes between the peasant 
and his lord, and from this court the lord and his officers are 
absolutely excluded. The civil enfranchisement of the individual 
was thus completed, but a preliminary measure of reform was 
required before the political disabilities of the class could be re- 
moved ; and this preliminary measure was neither more nor less 
than the abolition of the Magna Charta of the Hungarian nobles. 
It was clear, as already stated, that as long as the dearest privi- 
lege of the noble or free man (liber homo) in Hungary was not 

tract a loan on this basis, or to sell a portion of these estates. Inasmuch as 
these estates will not be sufficient, the other revenues of the country are pledged 
for the payment of this debt.' 
The insufficiency of the Kammeral lands (i. e., the lands vested in the exchequer of 
the Crown) for the liquidation of the newly-created debt will at once be recognised, when 
it is stated that the aggregate value of the urbarial rents was estimated at between 200 
and 300 millions of florins, whilst the Kammeral revenues were valued at between 40 
and 60 millions. The State-bonds would thus have experienced a similar fate with 
the French assignats — they would have been enormously depreciated, and the Cabinet 
would have had the discredit of initiating a great financial juggle. The obvious ope- 
ration of this measure, as a bribe to the peasants to support the revolution, might fairly 
warrant the supposition that the ministry designedly closed its eyes against the eco- 
nomical consequences of it, if its subsequent proposal to the Crown to issue 20 millions 
of inconvertible paper-florins, as well as the reckless use which M. Kossuth made of his 
bank-note press, with the sanction of its chief, Count. Louis Batthyanyi, did not go far 
to establish the presumption of a very slender acquaintance on its part with the first 
principles of national finance. 

d2 



44 HUNGARY. 

the right of self-taxation, but absolute immunity from all taxation, 
both local and general, it was impossible for the Crown to ennoble 
any great number of peasants, as it would have discharged them 
from their personal obligation to provide the necessary funds for 
the administration of the country. But the Crown was expressly 
bound by its coronation-oath to observe all the provisions of the 
Golden Bull, with the exception of the clause of the 3 Jst article 
which sanctioned the right of resistance, and from which it had 
been relieved since 1687, and one of these provisions secured 
to the whole body of nobles perfect freedom from taxation. The 
Crown was thus legally incompetent to propose any reform in re- 
gard to taxation : the Nobles alone could originate a measure — 
and Count Stephen Szechenyi has the merit of leavening public 
opinion on this subject by his writings, and of conquering the 
prejudices of his brother nobles by his speeches in the Diet. A 
Bill passed through both Houses in 1836,, by which the legal 
taxation of the nobles was for the first time acknowledged in the 
form of a bridge-toll — f cuncti et singuli absque ullo discrimine 
telonium solvere tenentur.' It was on this occasion that the 
aged Chief-Justice, Count Cziraky, could not refrain from 
shedding tears, as he felt that the ancient glory of the Hungarian 
nobility had departed with the erection of the suspension-bridge 
between Buda and Pesth. 

No further steps were taken in this direction before the Diet 
of 1843, with the exception of the measure already alluded to, 
which transferred the taxes of the peasant from his person to his 
land. Meanwhile it was necessary to conciliate the constitu- 
encies to an act of self-sacrifice, and it is the undeniable merit 
of the leaders of the new Opposition to have braved the unpopu- 
larity of advocating this measure in the counties : M. Deak, for 
instance, having been elected to a seat in the Lower House as 
one of the county delegates for Szala, renounced his election 
rather than obey the instructions of his constituents to oppose all 
reform on this head. The violence of the Cortes, or pauper 
nobles, at the elections in 1843, surpassed all that was hitherto on 
record, and the narrative of M. Rey furnishes, from the annals 
of the county of Szatmar, a most sanguinary illustration of their 
excesses : — 



THE LEGISLATIVE POWER OF THE DIET. 45 

1 At eight o'clock in the morning 140 Cortes enter by a side door 
the Hall of the Elections, drive away with clubs and pitchforks all who 
were already assembled there, barricade themselves inside the building, 
and proceed to the election. Meanwhile the electors arrive from all 
quarters, and, finding their number soon amount to about 4000, deter- 
mine to force the doors, and put an end to the intimidation. A conflict 
ensues, stones fly in all directions, and the persons from inside throw- 
ing projectiles, and striking out with their long pitchforks upon the 
human tide which dashed against the walls, cause a great massacre, 
carry discouragement into their ranks, and in the end remain masters 
of the field, with not more than a thousand electors about them. 
Having then concluded the election, the Report goes on to say, they 
make a sally, level to the ground with their terrible pitchforks about 
180 persons, of whom 30 are corpses, and drive off from the town in 
triumph in the carts which brought them there. The terror resulting 
from this day of election, which was decided by 140 assassins against 
thousands of electors, remained for some time undisturbed ; at last it 
was declared null and void ; two honourable persons were elected to 
replace the intruders ; but in going to their post they were exposed to 
shocking outrages from the same party at Pesth and at Presburg.' — 
p. 129. 

Enough has been said to show that the Decrees of the Diet of 
1832-36 constituted a new era in Hungary, and embarked the 
legislative body upon a course of administrative reforms, which 
required only time to mature its successful issue. Their effect 
was to conciliate to the Crown a large section of the old opposi- 
tion, and the succeeding Diets of 1839 and 1842 witnessed a 
great modification of political parties in the two Houses. The 
constitutional reformers henceforth adopted in matters of detail 
a separate line of action from the radical reformers; but the 
leaders on both sides agreed in sanctioning the principle of the 
nobles being subjected to taxation, though they differed very con- 
siderably in the mode of applying the principle. The simplest 
method was obviously to subject the nobles to all the taxes 
which the peasants hitherto had exclusively borne, but the most 
sanguine of the extreme radicals felt that it was impossible to 
carry such a measure through the county congregations, whose 
consent was necessary as a preliminary step. They therefore 
proposed that the nobles should contribute to the county cess 
(cassa domestica), and not to the State taxes. On the other 



46 HUNGARY. 

hand, Count Szechenyi, as well as the leaders of the body of 
constitutional reformers, which was henceforward distinguished 
as the Conservative party, advocated the propriety of esta- 
blishing a new fund* (fundus publicus), for general purposes of 
national expenditure on railways, schools, &c, the idea of 
which had been sketched out by Leopold II. in the Diet of 
1790. They objected to the plan of subjecting the nobles to the 
local taxation, on this ground : — Under the existing laws the 
regulation of the assessment of the local taxes rested with the 
county congregations, and the execution of it with certain officers, 
elected by those congregations, who were notoriously partial 
in their assessment, being affected by similar considerations 
to those which influenced the administration of justice on the 
part of the Szolga-birok. Custom had hitherto established a 
check upon any grossly unfair assessment of the peasants, as the 
Crown, which claimed to exercise a general supervision (jus 
supremse inspectionis) in behalf of the peasants who had no 
representatives, had come to exercise a revising power over the 
county assessments : but the constituencies would never have 
conceded such a power to the Crown with regard to any new 
taxes. It remained therefore that the assessment itself should 
be regulated by the Diet, which voted the amount ; and this was 
the measure which the constitutional party advocated. They, 
wished to leave the local taxes undisturbed, and to create an 
entirely new fund to be at the disposal of the Diet for national 
purposes, to be raised exclusively by the nobles. Experience 
certainly did not recommend any further application of the sys- 
tem which was in operation with respect to the libera oblata, or 
free grants of the nobles to the Crown; the amount of which 
was fixed by the Diet, but the assessment left to the counties. 
The libera oblata were usually assessed in such a manner that 
the inferior nobles, whose votes were of importance at the elec- 
tions, escaped their due burdens, whilst the great proprietors 



* The local taxes, or county cess, amounted to about 350,000/. The general taxes, 
or contributio militaris, to about 400,000/. The libera oblata, or occasional offering 
of the nobles, sometimes reached 40,000/.; for instance, in 1836, for establishing and 
maintaining a Magyar theatre at Pesth. It was proposed tluit the new system should 
commence with a fundus publicus of 200,000/. 



PREROGATIVE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CROWN. 47 

were taxed not in any fixed proportion to the extent of their 
estates or their revenues, but according to some arbitrary standard 
in the assessor's mind as to the abstract capacity of a rich pro- 
prietor to pay taxes. Such a method of assessment was obviously 
at variance with the first principles of self-taxation. 

The Prerogative and Functions of the Crown. 

The King, as already seen, exercises the legislative power 
in conjunction with the Diet ; but the supreme executive power 
is vested in the Sovereign alone. He is the temporal head of 
the Church, and nominates to all Ecclesiastical dignities, and, 
although required by the Act of Settlement of 1723 to be a 
member of the Roman Catholic Church, he exercises a right 
of supreme inspection over the two Protestant communions, the 
privileges of which are regulated by the 26th article of the 
Decree of 1791, as well as over the non-united Greek Church. 
The Crown further exercises the 'jus placeti? in reference to the 
See of Rome, as no papal bull can enter the realm without the 
King's pleasure. One of the more peculiar features of the pre- 
rogative is the power of keeping open for three years the ap- 
pointment to vacant bishoprics, and other high ecclesiastical 
offices; the revenues meanwhile finding their way into the Royal 
Exchequer. It would appear from an anecdote narrated by Mr. 
Paget in regard to the estates of the Bishop of Agram, that the 
Kammeral administration was more popular with the tenants than 
the Episcopal, inasmuch as the officers of the Exchequer were 
more accessible to bribes than the bishop's steward. If Mr. 
Paget's information is to be relied upon, the stewardship of the 
Kammeral lands was a very different post from the stewardship of 
the Chiltern Hundreds, although the latter is still considered to 
be too dangerous a temptation to a member of the House of 
Commons. The Kammeral administration was in fact a gigantic 
bureaucratical abuse. All noble lands which fell in to the Crown 
upon the failure of heirs, vested for a time in the Exchequer until 
the Crown should grant them out again. All newly conquered 
lands belonged in like manner to the Crown, so that the greater 
part of the rich Banat, which was only recovered from the Turks 



48 HUNGARY. 

at the peace of Passarrowitz a.d. 1718, was administered in this 
manner. The knowledge of the corrupt practices of the subor- 
dinate officers contributed to paralyse the energies of the superior 
members of the Hungarian Exchequer to such a degree, that, as 
they apprehended a job in q every suggestion on the part of the 
stewards, they put a stop to all improvements in their anxiety 
to prevent malversations. The Government itself has at times 
proposed to put up the Kammeral estates to sale, as the best 
means of destroying a corrupt system which they could not control, 
but the Diet has been averse to the arrangement, and the indivi- 
duals who have a vested interest in the abuses, have raised so 
many petty obstacles, that very little progress has been made with 
the measure. Besides, there were political considerations in the 
way, as the rights of nobility accompanied the acquisition of 
Kammeral lands. 

The Crown has also the right of granting the franchise by 
letters of nobility, as well as titles of honour : it likewise grants 
charters to free towns; but the Diet claims the right of according 
or refusing votes to the delegates of newly-chartered corporations. 
Justice is further administered in the King's name, but not very 
efficiently, as there are no Circuit Judges, and the King's Courts 
are rather courts of appeal than of original jurisdiction. The 
Crown is also the fountain of mercy. It has lastly the right of 
making war and peace, and of corresponding with foreign powers,* 
and it may also call out the Insurrection or Militia of the nobles, 
although it cannot levy the military contribution to pay the 
standing armyf without the consent of the Diet. Some privileges 
indeed are not enjoyed by the King until he has been crowned 

* It is difficult to understand how Mr. Paget has been led to state that the county 
congregations have a right of corresponding with foreign powers, of which he cites 
an instance as having occurred not long since in the case of ihe king of Bavaria. The 
counties could correspond with one another, but had no right of diplomatic intercourse 
with foreign powers, which is one of the attributes of sovereignty. The 101st Article 
of the Decree of 1723 seems to be decisive against such a power resting with the 
counties, irrespectively of the fact that the law of nations would not have sanctioned 
such a practice. 

■j- The 8th Article of the Decree of 1715 recognises the insufficiency of the Insur- 
rection for the ordinary defence of the kingdom, and the necessity of maintaining a 
standing army — ( validior et regulata militia turn ex nativis, turn externis, pro omni 
eventu intertenenda.' This law seems to have laid the foundation of an united im- 
perial and royal army. The Decrees of 1715 and 1723 may be read in Schmauss, 
< Corpug Juris Gentium/ vol. ii. 



PREROGATIVE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CROWN. 49 

with the crown of St. Stephen : for instance, he is not entitled to 
some of the regalia, which embrace the duty on salt, the produce 
of the mines and the post office, the subsidy of the clergy, &c. ; 
nor can an uncrowned king make a legal grant of lands, which is 
one of the many reasons why the Hungarians insist so strongly 
on the ceremony of coronation. 

The executive power of the King was exercised through the 
Hungarian Chancery, which attended upon his person, and 
through the Council of the Lieutenant, which sat at Buda. 
The former was composed of an Aulic Chancellor, one or two 
Vice-Chancellors, and ten or twelve Aulic Councillors, amongst 
whom there was always one Bishop of the Roman Catholic 
Church, the remainder being magnates and nobles. All ques- 
tions were decided in this council by the majority of votes, as well 
as in the Council of the Lieutenant of the Kingdom. This latter 
council, over which the Palatine presided, and which consisted of 
twenty-two members nominated by the Crown, was the Supreme 
Council of the Realm of Hungary, and it was regulated by the 
Decree of 1723, which instituted it. The functions of the Hun- 
garian Chancery at Vienna, in relation to the Consilium Regium 
Locum-tenentiale, were not so much ministerial as secretarial to 
the King — as the Council at Buda corresponded directly with the 
Crown, and had the right of remonstrance against any measure 
of the Chancery which might seem to it to be not warranted 
by law. It exercised a general administrative superintendence 
over Hungary by means of ordinances, termed intimata, which 
were addressed to the magistrates of the counties. The Courts 
of Justice, however, were independent of this Council, as well as 
the departments of War and Finance. 

It was a frequent complaint on the part of the Opposition 
that the German element was admitted to a share in the councils 
of the King of Hungary, when it was expressly provided by the 
eleventh article of the Decree of 1741 that ' H ungarian affairs 
should be treated of with Hungarians.' These complaints had cer- 
tainly some colour of justice as far as the Hungarian Chamber of 
Finance was concerned, over which the Aulic Chamber at Vienna 
sought to maintain a right of superintendence, instead of a right 
of correspondence^ contrary to the 18th article of the Decree of 
1715. Again, the administration of the mines in Hungary, which 



50 HUNGARY. 

formed part of the regalia of the Crown, had come to be controlled 
by the Supreme Council of Mines at Vienna, whereas the Chief 
Commissioner (Oberst Kammer-Graf) was properly dependent 
on the Treasury at Buda; but practically this encroachment was 
attended with no bad consequences, and a sort of formal regularity 
was maintained in most cases by the Aulic Chamber professing 
merely to discharge the functions of secretary to the king. In 
most other respects the complaint was not well founded. The 
Diet of 1741, which established the law on this subject, had 
decided by its 11th article that ( Negotia Ungara cum Ungaris 
tractabuntur ; in Aula Ungari consiliarii aderunt ; ad ipsum etiam 
Status ministerium Sua Majestas nationem Ungaram adhibere 
dignabitur.' The Government, on the other hand, seems to have 
held that as long as the Crown always communicated with the 
country through the medium of the legal Hungarian channels, 
it was no real grievance that it sought the best advice from any 
available source ; and further, that an Aulic Council was ex- 
pressly recognised by the Decree, as well as a Ministry of State 
common to the other branches of the monarchy, into which 
Hungarians were declared to be admissible. 

It is not proposed on the present occasion to enter any further 
into the details of the political administration of Hungary.* But 
it may be convenient to notice the office of Palatine, the chief 
dignitary of the kingdom — an anomalous kind of magistrate, and 
a sort of intermediate power between the king and the people. 
This institution, although peculiar in its present form to Hungary, 
was not in its origin singular or confined to that kingdom. However 
complete the Magyar may imagine the elective rights of his an- 
cestors, it is clear that some fundamental law restrained them to 
the dynasty of Arpad. There is no adequate reason to suppose 
that in this respect the Hungarian monarchy differed from that 
of the Franks in the Merovingian times, or did not observe the 
same rule with that which was maintained by the Ricos-hombres 

* One of the most complete works upon Hungary is M. Demian's ' Tableau Geo- 
graphique et Politique des Royaumes de Hongrie, d'Esclavonie, de Croatie, et de la 
Grande Principaute de Transylvanie,' translated from the German. It was published 
in Paris in 1809, so that the statistical facts are superseded, but the general informa- 
tion is still valuable from its accuracy. 



PREROGATIVE AND FUNCTIONS OF THE CROWN. 51 

of Aragon, and likewise by those of Castile before the twelfth 
century. ' The reigning family was immutable ; but at every 
vacancy the heir awaited the confirmation of a popular election, 
whether that were a substantial privilege or a mere ceremony.' 
Such is the description which the Historian of the Middle Ages 
gives of the monarchy of the Franks ; and the uninterrupted suc- 
cession of twenty-three sovereigns of the race of Arpad, from St. 
Stephen to the last male prince of that blood, Andreas III., leads 
to no other conclusion than that, from the earliest times of the 
monarchy, the right of election was limited within the reigning 
family. The observance of such a rule at once accounts for the 
existence of an elective guardian to the person of the King, who 
might be a minor, by whose side also stood two elective guardians 
of the Sacred Crown of St. Stephen (sacrae regni coronae conser- 
vatores). The Palatine was in fact the Mayor of the Palace of the 
Arpad ian monarchs before the reign of Andreas II. (anno 1222) — ■ 
subsequently to which time there seems to have been engrafted on 
his original functions an authority very similar to that which the 
Justiciary of Aragon exercised in the latter part of the thirteenth 
century, as mediator between the King and his barons. From 
this period a series of Decrees of the Diet have contributed to 
enlarge the province of the Palatine's action, and the office at 
last has come to embrace all the functions of sovereignty. In 
the absence of the King the Palatine is his substitute ; in his 
presence he is a sort of Prime Minister and Mediator between 
the Crown and the nation. Elected by the nobles out of four 
candidates nominated by the Crown, and holding his office for 
life, he is at the same time the President of the Diet, the Speaker 
of the House of Magnates, the Chairman of the Council of Go- 
vernment, the Chief Judge of the Supreme Septemviral Court, 
and the Commander-in-chief of the Forces. According to law, 
this office ought not to remain vacant longer than a year, and it 
was a subject of just complaint against Maria Theresa and Joseph 
II., that from 1765 to 1790 the Palatine's office remained vacant, 
his place being supplied by a Viceroy nominated by the Crown 
— a functionary unknown to the Hungarian constitution. It was 
of the last importance to the Crown that the loyalty of the Pa- 
latine should be above suspicion, and thus, although any subject 



52 HUNGARY. 

was qualified to fill the office, it was generally conferred on a 
near relative of the reigning monarch. 

The Monarchy and the Dynastic Succession. 

The history of the monarchy resolves itself into three well- 
defined periods. The Arpadian, or native period, extends from 
St. Stephen to Otho of Bavaria, the cousin of Andreas III., the 
last male prince of the blood of Arpad (a.d. 1000 — 1308). 
The mixed period ushers in a French dynasty in the House of 
Anjou, and concludes with a Sclave of the race of the Jagellos 
(Charles I. — Louis II.). The Austrian period commences with 
Ferdinand I. (a.d. 1526), and continues uninterrupted to the 
present time. The reign of Louis the Great (1370-1382) is 
probably the most splendid epoch of Hungarian history, though 
the memory of Matthias Corvinus is more dear to the Magyar. 
Louis had inherited from his father, Charles of Anjou, a patri- 
monial sceptre extending over Hungary proper, Bosnia, Croatia, 
Servia, Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Bulgaria. This 
brilliant inheritance determined his uncle, Casimir the Great of 
Poland, to accomplish the union of the Crowns of Hungary and 
Poland in the person of his nephew. He accordingly proposed 
him for election as his successor to the Diet at Cracow, which 
after much opposition complied at last with his wishes. The 
result, however, did not realise the fond anticipations of Casimir. 
He had hoped that his nephew's power would have maintained 
the independence of the Crown of Poland against the encroach- 
ments of the nobles, and the assaults of the military monks of 
Pomerania; whereas his succession gave origin to those cove- 
nants (pacta conventa) between the nobles and the candidate for 
the vacant throne, which have made an elective monarchy a by- 
word amongst nations, and by the discord which they have en- 
tailed, have caused Poland herself to be erased from the catalogue 
of European states. Hungary, however, had no reason to blame 
the connexion of the two thrones. She lent her assistance to 
Poland to reduce her revolted dependency of Red Prussia, and 
Louis, in acknowledgment of her services, annexed the recovered 
province to the Crown of St. Stephen. His career of conquest 



THE MONARCHY AND THE DYNASTIC SUCCESSION. 53 

extended across Europe from Naples to the Crimea; and whilst 
he himself wielded the honorary sceptre of Jerusalem, the Way- 
wode of Transylvania governed Sicily as his Viceroy. His grate- 
ful subjects mourned his death for three years,* and placed his 
daughter on the throne under the title of Maria Rex Ungariac. 
Their sorrow had in it some foretaste of coming misfortunes, for 
the Crescent already floated on the walls of Adrianople, and it 
only needed the torch of civil discord — which soon burnt fiercely 
in Hungary for two centuries — to light up the path of the Mus- 
sulman into the very sanctuary of St. Stephen. 

The subsequent part of the mixed period was even more 
disastrous to Hungary than the Wars of the Two Roses were to 
England,, to which it bears some resemblance, both in the cha- 
racter of its events, and the final solution of its difficulties. A 
disputed claim to the throne, consequent on the failure of male 
issue to Louis the Great, gave rise to a long series of internal 
troubles, which laid Hungary open to the ravages of the Turks. 
The meteoric career of Matthias Corvinus serves for a moment 
to illumine this period of darkness and discord ; but his successors 
were feeble and indolent, and the fatal battle of Mohacz, a.d. 
1526, placed Hungary at the feet of Solyman the Great. Mean- 
while Ferdinand of Austria, the brother-in-law of Louis II. who 
fell at Mohacz, laid claim to the vacant throne by virtue of various 
agreements concluded in the years 1463, 1468, 1491, and 1515, 
between the House of Austria and the Kings of Hungary ; but as 
these agreements had never been sanctioned by the Diet, a party 
of the nobles declared themselves in favour of a Magyar King in 
the person of John Zapolya, the Waywode of Transylvania. A 
civil war thereupon ensued. The Magyar magnate called in the 
aid of the Turk, and Solyman carried his victorious banners to 
the gates of Vienna (a.d. 1529). The result of the siege, how- 
ever, was disastrous to the Turk, and his discomfiture was as 
complete as that which John Sobieski, the Pole, inflicted in the 
following century on the Mussulman ally of Tekeli. 

Although the agreements between the House of Austria and 
the Kings of Hungary are to be regarded rather as family-coin - 

* Quantum ejus mors Ungaris et sociis maeroris attulerit hinc facile considerari 
potest, quod annos tres universa Ungaria pulla veste incessit. — Bonfinius, 1. x. 



54 HUNGARY. 

pacts than as state-treaties, yet the legal succession of Ferdinand I., 
as King of Hungary, dates from the death of Louis 11./ and 
not from the Diet of 1547, to which some writers refer it. The 
best evidence of this fact is supplied by the Statute Book. The 
Decrees of the Diets convoked by Ferdinand in the interval 
between 1 526 and 1547 are all found in the Corpus Juris, and 
the Decree itself of 1547 is explicitly entitled ' Decretum Septi- 
mum,' as comprising the laws of the seventh Diet of his reign. 
It is in this Decree that we find the first traces of a formal recog- 
nition of an hereditary right of succession in the House of Aus- 
tria, as Article Y. Section V. recites expressly : ' cum se Status et 
Ordines regni non solum majestati suae, sed et suorum hseredum 
imperio et potestati in omne tempus subdiderint.' It would 
appear from a letter addressed by Cardinal Pazmandy to Ferdi- 
nand II., which is preserved amongst the ' Literse Procerum 
Regni Hungarici,' that this Decree was held in his time to re- 
strict the right of election on the part of the Diet to the 
dynasty of Rodolph of Hapsburg : the House of Lorraine, as is 
well known, not commingling itself with the House of Hapsburg 
before the marriage of Maria Theresa with the Emperor Francis I. 
This limited right of election was subsequently abandoned by the 
Diet of 1687, when the hereditary succession of the male line 
of the House of Austria according to primogeniture was de- 
finitively established.* 

The order of succession was further extended to the female 
line in 1723, when the Diet, with the object of securing the 
perpetual union of the Kingdom of Hungary with the other 
hereditary states of the Llouse of Austria, adopted the same rule 
of succession which was received in them, and which had been 

* Decretum IV. 1687. Status et Ordines Sacrum Josephum in regem unanimiter et 
faustis acclamationibus coronarunt. 

Art. 2. Status et Ordines amodo in posterum masculorum Sacrae Caesareae-Regiae 
Majestatis primogenitum, id ipsum statuentibus, Art. 5, 1547, aliisque superinde 
exstantibus pro legitime- suo rege et Doinino post habituri, et erga praemittendam 
articulorum diplomaticorum acceptationem seu assecurationem et juramentum in regem 
coronaturi. 

Art. 3. In casum defectus seminis masculini, extunc ejusdem devolvendi regiminis 
successio, erga praemittendam similem assecurationem, redeat ad semen masculinum 
Regis Hispaniarum, adeoque duntaxat in defectu hujus, antiqua et vetns approbata 
consuetudo prserogativaque Statuum et Ordinum in electione regis suum locum habeat. 



THE MONARCHY AND THE DYNASTIC SUCCESSION. 55 

formally promulgated in 1713 in the Pragmatic Sanction of 
Charles VI. This family statute of the House of Hapsburg bad 
become the fundamental law of succession in the hereditary states, 
where the legislative functions of the Crown were nearly absolute, 
immediately upon its promulgation ; but it required the assent of 
the co-ordinate legislative powers in Hungary before it could 
supersede in that kingdom the Act of Settlement of 1687. This 
assent was formally given by the Decree of the Diet of 17'^3, 
which enacted that, on failure of male heirs to his Imperial and 
Royal Majesty, ' the hereditary right of successio7i to the Kingdom 
and Crown of Hungary, and the -parts, provinces, and kingdoms 
pertaining to it, by Divine help already recovered or still to be 
recovered, should be transferred to the female line of the House of 
Austria, in the persons successively of the descendants of Charles VI, 
Joseph 1., and Leopold I, respectively Emperors and Kings of 
Hungary, and their legitimate Roman Catholic successors in the 
Archduchy of Austria, according to the order of primogeniture 
established by his Most Sacred Imperial and Royal Majesty in his 
other hereditary kingdoms and provinces in and beyond Germany, 
to be ruled and governed, indivisibly and inseparably, alike and 
together, and jointly with the kingdom of Hungary, and the parts, 
kingdoms, and provinces annexed to it' * 

• An extract is subjoined from the 2nd Article of the original Decree, which is to 
be found both in Schmauss, ' Corpus Juris,' torn, ii., and in Dumont's ' Corps Diplo- 
matique,' torn. viii. Its construction, as not unusual with the decrees, is not strictly 
grammatical, but its meaning is obvious : — 

' Quosvis prseterea. etiam internos motus, et facile oriri solita, ipsis Statibus et Ordi- 
nibus Regni ab antiquo optime cognita Interregni mala, solicite prsecavere cupientes, 
Majorum suorum laudabilibus exemplis incitati, volentesque erga Sacratissimam 
Caesaream et Regiam Majestatem, Dominum Dominum eorum Clementissimum, 
gratos et fideles semet humillime exhibere, in defectu Sexus Masculini Sacratissimae 
Caesareae et Regias Majestatis (quem defectum Deus clementissime avertere dignetur) 
Jus haereditarium succedendi in Hungariae Regnum, et Coronam, ad eandemque 
Partes pertinentes, Provincias, et Regna, jam Divino auxilio recuperata, et recupe- 
randa, etiam in Sexum Augustae Domus suae Austriacae foemineum, primo locoquidem 
ab altefata modo Regnante Sacratissima Caesarea et Regia Majestate, deiu in hujua 
defectu, a. Divo olim Josepho, his quoque deficientibus, ex Lumbis Divi olim Leopoldi 
Imperatorum et Regum Hungaria3 descendentes, eorundemque legit imos Romano- 
Catholicos Successores utriusque Sexus Austriae Archiduces, juxta stabilitum per 
Sacratissimam Caesaream ac Regiam regnantem Majestatem in aliis quoque suis 
Regnis et Provinciis haereditariis, in et extra Germaniam sitis, Primogeniturae Ordi- 
nem, Jure et Ordine praemisso, indivisibiliter, ac inseparabiliter, invicem, et in- 



5G HUNGARY. 

Such was the last act of settlement, which governs the succes- 
sion to the Crown of Hungary in the present day. It was also 
expressly recited in the first article of the same decree, that the 
legitimate heir, according to the law of succession established in 
the German and other states of the House of Austria, should by 
the same hereditary right of succession be received and crowned 
as indefeasible King of Hungary. It seems difficult to under- 
stand how, in the face of this decree, which was part of the 
statute law of the kingdom, the revolutionary government could 
venture to assert that the throne was elective in the same procla- 
mation from Debreczin, in which, with some inconsistency, it 
declared the House of Hapsburg- Lorraine to have forfeited its 
right to it. It seems still more difficult to assent to the proposi- 
tion that the order of succession was changed, as contended for in 
the manifesto published in the name of the Hungarian Govern- 
ment, by the abdication of the Emperor- King Ferdinand and the 
renunciation of his next brother the Archduke Francis Charles 
in favour of the next heir, his eldest son, Francis Joseph. The 
general law is clear;* and there exists no positive law in the 
Hungarian Statute Book which precludes the King from abdi- 
cating the throne. On the contrary, the annals of the Kings of 
Hungary, as well as those of the House of Hapsburg, supply a 
precedent in the abdication of Rodolph II. in favour of his bro- 
ther Matthias II. It is needless to observe that rights of natural 
succession, which are regulated in the most incontestable manner 
by positive laws, cannot suffer any diminution by the voluntary 
waiver on the part of others of prior claims. 

But the nature of the political union which was henceforth 
established between the kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian 
States, is not so clearly defined as the order of succession to the 
throne. It would appear from the preamble to the decree, that, 
whilst it was intended to secure a mutual cO-intelligence and 

simal, ac una cum Begno Hungarice, et Partibus, Regnis, et Provinces eidem annexis, 
hseriditarie possidentis, regendam et guberuandam transferunt, et memorafam Succes- 
sionem acceptant, taliterque eandem Successioneni Foemineam, in Augusta Domo Aus- 
triaca introductam et agnitam (extensis ad earn nunc pro tunc Articulis 2 et 3 anni 
1687 et pariter 2 et 3 anni 1715) juxta Ordinem supradictum stabiliunt,' &c. 

* Cf. Grotius de Jure Belli et Pacis, 1. ii. c. vii. § 26. An abdicari possit regnnm, 
aut jua succedendi in regnum ? Et quin pro se quisque abdicare possitnon est dubium. 



THE MONARCHY AND THE DYNASTIC SUCCESSION. 57 

union against all foreign enemies, as well as domestic foes, the 
laws and customs of Hungary were not to be set aside — in fact, 
that a separate administration was to co-exist with a common 
government. The nature of this union has been exceedingly 
well explained by Mr. Wheaton in his ' Elements of International 
Law :'— 

6 The union of the different states composing the Austrian monarchy 
is a real union. The hereditary dominions of the House of Austria, 
the kingdoms of Hungary and Bohemia, the Lombardo- Venetian 
kingdom, and other states, are all indissolubly united under the same 
sceptre, but with distinct fundamental laws and other political insti- 
tutions. 

' It appears to be an intelligible distinction between such an union 
as that of the Austrian states and all other unions which are merely 
personal under the same crowned head, that in the case of a real union, 
though the separate sovereignty of each state may still subsist inter- 
nally in respect to its co-ordinate states, and in respect to the imperial 
crown, yet the sovereignty of each is merged in the general sovereignty 
of the empire as to their international relations with foreign powers/ — 
Part i. book ii. § 18, 2nd edition. 

The injudicious attempt of the political Procrustes of the last 
century, Joseph II., to abolish the local institutions of the counties 
and to impose an uniform central administrative system, after the 
French model, upon Hungary in common with all the hereditary 
states, aroused the constitutional spirit which had gone to sleep 
during the long reign of Maria- Theresa, and provoked so general 
an irritation that his successor, Leopold II., found it necessary to 
allay it by a formal* recognition of the administrative inde- 
pendence of Hungary. It is not too much to say that, had the 
reign of this wise prince not been prematurely cut short, Hungary 

' * 10 Article, 1790. — ' Sua Majestas agnoscit quod licet successio sexus foeminei 
Domus Austriacae per Articulum I. et II. anni 1723 in regno Hungarise, partibusque 
eidem annexis stabilita, eundem quem in aliis regnis et provinciis in et extra Ger- 
maniam sitis juxta stabilitum successionis Ordinem inseparabiliter ac indivisibiliter 
possidendis, Principem concernat, Hungaria nihilominus cum partibus annexis sit 
regnum liberum et, relate ad totam regiminis formam, hoc intellectis Dicasteriis 
[boards of administration] suis, independens, id est nulli alteri regno aut populo ob- 
noxium, sed proprium habens consistentiam et constitutionem, proinde a legitime 
coronato Hungaria? rege adeoque etiam a Sua Majestate Sacratissima et suis succes- 
soribus propriis legibus et consuetudinibus, non vero ad normam aliarum provinciarum, 
dictantibus id Articulis 3, 1715, item 8 et 11, 1741, regendum et gubornandum.' 

E 



58 HUNGARY. 

would at that time have entered upon an efficient course of legal 
reforms; for the establishment of the Deputatio Regnicolaris, 
already alluded to, was an acknowledgment on the part of the 
legislature of its conviction that the nation had outgrown its 
institutions. But the unexpected demise of Leopold II., and the 
general troubles of Europe consequent on the catastrophe which 
befel the elder branch of the Bourbons in 1792, led to the indefi- 
nite adjournment in Hungary, as elsewhere, of all measures of 
internal improvement. 

Political History since 1843-4. 

The singular legal customs to which the attention of the reader 
has been invited, do not seem to have been mere forms of pro- 
ceeding adopted many centuries ago for their supposed con- 
venience, and stereotyped like the rest of the Hungarian consti- 
tution, but they rather represented certain fundamental elements 
of the Magyar character which pervaded every avenue of political 
and social life. 

' Hungary,' writes M. Rey, ' is pre-eminently the land of discus- 
sion and protests. The noble, accustomed to keep a jealous watch 
over the enormous privileges which he enjoys, and to reserve them for 
a future opportunity in case a superior power should for the moment 
deprive him of any, makes a continual use of protests. The country 
inscribes its protests against the King or any other party in the Great 
Book of Grievances, and awaits for a century the arrival of a propi- 
tious day for their redress. The peasant gentleman, on the other 
hand, uses the magic protest so frequently as to provoke laughter ; it 
is, in fact, his substitute for an oath.' * 

It may be easily conceived, as the vanquished party in Hun- 
gary always reserved its rights, that the tyrannical reforms of 
Joseph II. would find far sterner resistance in Hungary than in 
any other part of his dominions. In Bohemia the opposition 
succumbed to him, but in Hungary it ultimately triumphed, for 
the Hungarian opposition united a national with a political 
feeling, the expression of which is to be found in the laws of 

* Cautela (ovas in Magyar) was the technical term. The Croatian Deputies, in the 
Hungarian Diet, always concluded their speeches, after 1830, with the words, 'solemnem 
interpono cautelam 1 — I enter a solemn protest. 



POLITICAL HISTORY SINCE 1843-4. 5 ( J 

1790-1. The spirit of resistance to the King's government, which 
Josephism provoked, was lulled again to sleep during the wars 
of the French Revolution, or only exhibited itself at intervals on 
the question of custom-duties in 1802 and 1807, and in the dis- 
cussions respecting Count Wallis's paper-money in 181 1. But it 
burst forth with redoubled energy in 1825. The neglect of the 
King's government to convoke a diet during an interval of sixteen 
years had not merely given occasion to fierce indignation on the 
part of an aristocracy most jealous of its privileges, but it had 
indirectly weakened the central power by the inaction which 
it imposed upon it, whilst the local bodies were in efficient 
activity. 

The Diet of 1825 was a climacteric epoch in Hungarian affairs. 
From this period the opposition, which had hitherto maintained a 
defensive attitude, assumed an aggressive character, partly in 
consequence of the modern revolutionary spirit which pervaded 
Europe having engrafted itself in Hungary on the anarchical 
habits of the middle ages; partly by reason of the government 
observing its ancient official tradition of keeping aloof from the 
struggles in the Diet, or interfering rather as an arbitrator 
than a partisan. It overlooked the fact, that in 1825 it had 
placed in the hands of the opposition the modern weapons of 
parliamentary warfare, whilst all the means of defence and resist- 
ance, which the ancient institutions supplied, continued to be at 
its disposal. 

The false position of the King's government became more 
evident with each succeeding Diet, and the conviction of its 
incompetency, as hitherto organised, to meet the difficulties 
which threatened to attend the session of 1839, led to the forma- 
tion of a party which, by the course of events, is entitled to be 
regarded as the Constitutional Party, under the parliamentary 
leadership of Count Aurel Desewffy, which successfully checked 
for a time the violent excesses of the Opposition. The main 
object of this party seems to have been to promote administrative 
reforms in a strictly legal manner, and to resist all attempts to 
effect a political separation from the other states of the House of 
Austria. Accepting the Pragmatic Sanction as a fundamental 
law, it sought to make the Decree of 1 723 a reality, believing that 

e2 



60 HUNGARY. 

the independence which it secured was sufficient for the happiness 
of Hungary, whilst its greatness demanded that it should not 
be isolated from the rest of Europe. Upon the unexpected 
death of Count A. Desewffy, the leadership of this party devolved 
on Count George Apponyi, whose influence with the King's 
government mainly contributed to procure its assent to two very 
important and popular laws, respecting the Magyar language, 
and the liberty of religion, more especially in regard to mixed 
marriages. It may be here observed, that the suppression of 
the Latin language, which had been in preparation since 1825, 
was an event to be expected, not merely because it had been 
abolished by Joseph II., who, by attempting to impose the 
German language on Hungary, awakened the nation to the 
utility of a living language, but also because a dead language 
must give way to a national idiom, as soon as the national in- 
tellect expands itself beyond the circle of ideas which are em- 
braced by the dead language. The objection on this occasion 
was not so much to the change itself, as to the harsh manner in 
which it was proposed to effect it, and to the principle of race 
being invoked to determine a question which was strictly political. 
The appointment of Count G. Apponyi to the office of Vice- 
Chancellor of the Hungarian Chancery, which took place after 
this Diet, was the result of the influence which he had acquired 
with his party, and it was hailed by them as an earnest that the 
King's government had determined to abandon its ancient 
bureaucratical routine, and to adopt a positive policy in the 
Chambers. This party, though conservative in its tendency, had 
not before this time shaken off the deep distrust with which 
many of its members had been accustomed to scan the measures 
of the Government, for the King's Government had been for so 
long a time identified in general opinion with the Austrian Sys- 
tem, that resistance to the latter being regarded as a constitu- 
tional right entailed a systematic opposition to the former. They 
were now agreeably surprised to find themselves supported by 
the King's family-minister, Prince Metternich, who, although 
not interfering with the Chancellor of Hungary in the details of 
Government, exerted at times, as Chancellor of Court and State, 
a control over its general policy. It should not be forgotten, in 






POLITICAL HISTORY SINCE 1843-4. 61 

criticising the system of government hitherto followed out in 
Hungary, that it was impossible to govern the country through 
its parliaments, until there were well-defined parties in the par- 
liament;* and it is to the credit of Prince Metternich, as a states- 
man, that he welcomed the first opportunity which presented 
itself for governing Hungary by its parliament. 

As long as the political action of the Diet was confined to the 
defence of legal privileges and positive rights, and the Crown was 
merely the fountain of grace and redress, the position of the 
Palatine and his Council, as an intermediate power, caused no 
particular inconvenience. But it was far otherwise now, after 
the Diet had begun to be summoned with regularity, and to 
exercise the functions of a parliament ; and the difficulties of the 
situation were increased by the personal character of the late 
Palatine, the Archduke Joseph, who had filled this high office 
ever since 1796, and who naturally clung to the political tradi- 
tions of his youth ; yet it was necessary that there should be a 
perfect understanding between the Chancery at Vienna and the 
Council of the Palatine at Buda, in order that the machinery of 
government should work smoothly and evenly. The Chancellor 
at this time was Count Mailath, who had been appointed to his 
office in the hope that he would have more influence with the 
Diet than his predecessor, Count Palffy. He failed, however, to 
realise this anticipation during 1843-4; and although he had 
been defended by Count G. Apponyi's party from the vigorous 
assaults of the Opposition, it was not without difficulty that he 
acquiesced in the appointment of their leader to the second seat 
in the Chancery. It was idle, however, for the Chancellor to 
attempt to work hand-in-hand with a party in the Parliament, 
unless the Council at Buda, which had the immediate direction 
of the executive, co-operated with the Chancery. The Palatine 
at first distrusted the doctrine of parliamentary majorities, and 
doubted the wisdom of the King's Government initiating measures 
in the Diet ; but he ultimately acceded to the policy of Apponyi, 

* The appointment of Count G. Apponyi marks an epoch in Hungarian history, 
which may remind the English reader of Lord Danby's administration in the reign of 
Charles II., when a permanent and compact party was for the first time organized in 
the House of Commons, and the foundation laid of the present parliamentary system. 



62 HUNGARY. 

and there can be no doubt that, under the circumstances, 
his death in 1847 was a great misfortune to Hungary, for he 
united a practical knowledge of the country and the people 
with much personal authority and influence, and he would have 
been able to avoid the shoals on which his successor suffered 
shipwreck. 

During the interval of the formation of the party of Count G. 
Apponyi, the opposition in the Diet had undergone numerous 
modifications. The old opposition had been essentially aristo- 
cratic and national, resting itself upon the privileges of the 
nobility and the independence of the country. The legislative 
committees of 1790 and 1825 had prepared the way for certain 
administrative and judicial reforms, but it was only after Count 
Stephen Szechenyi had given an impulse to the new order of ideas 
respecting the material advancement of Hungary, that reform, as 
such, became the vogue. The enthusiasm of the Magyar cha- 
racter now began to lead the opposition astray, and it deviated a 
little from the legal path in the Diet of 1836 ; it was not, how- 
ever, until 1843-4, that revolutionary notions seem to have found 
acceptance with any number of its members.* The Diet had 
ended after a series of stormy debates with but few practical 
results in the way of legislation : during its sittings, however, the 
question of the commercial relations between Austria and Hun- 
gary had been mooted, and all parties had agreed in the right of 
the Diet to legislate respecting them. The Government itself, which 
had not hitherto recognised this right, perceiving the Diet to be 
unanimous, acceded at once to its views. The agitation was in 
consequence removed from the benches of the Diet to the plat- 
form of the Hall of the Comitat of Pesth, where M. Kossuth, 
who had not at this time a seat in the Chamber, harangued 

* Considerable light has lately been thrown upon this period by the letters of Count 
Camille Desewffy, in the Lloyd Journal of Vienna, who has also made public the 
views of Prince Metternich, as circulated amongst the members and friends of the 
King's government, under the title of ' Aphoristical Remarks on the State of Hungary at 
the Conclusion of the Year 1844.' It would appear from these letters that there was a 
growing conviction in the minds of many of the members of the Diet that a crisis was 
approaching in which the struggle would be not for reform, but for dominion (herrschaft), 
and that it was necessary at once to organize a strong party, whose policy should seek 
to reconcile the constitutional liberties of Hungary with the exigencies of the united 
monarchy. 



LEG SLATIVE SESSION OF 1847-8. 63 

the members of his ' Society for the Protection of National 
Industry.' The object of this Association, which was termed 
the ' Vedegylet' (Protection League), was ostensibly to discou- 
rage the consumption of all foreign produce. M. Kossuth seems 
at this time to have been a disciple of Dr. List, and he employed 
all his rhetorical skill, which was considerable, in commending 
that narrow class of economical doctrines to the acceptance of an 
agricultural population. 

The real object, however, of the founders of this Society was 
to alienate the minds of its members from Austria ; and to pre- 
vent an amicable arrangement of the commercial relations between 
that country and Hungary, which might have led to the union of 
their material interests. At the same time an association of this 
kind was calculated to serve as a powerful engine for political 
purposes. It was obvious that the rules of this Society, in an 
economical point of view, were inconsistent with its professed 
object of f Protection/ as its members bound themselves to ab- 
stain indiscriminately from the use of all foreign articles, and so 
substituted ' Prohibition ' for Protection. It perished accordingly 
from its own extravagance, having exposed its members at last 
to general ridicule. But it had served its turn. The real object 
of its leaders was betrayed even at its early meetings, when they 
incautiously appealed to the example of the British Colonies in 
North America throwing off the yoke of the mother country. 
The protective mask seems since the Revolution to have been not 
merely dropped, but thrown away, as the friends of M. Kossuth 
now assert him not only to be, but to have ever been, a free- 
trader. Their claims, however, to veracity in 1849 can only be 
admitted at the sacrifice of his claims to honesty in 1844. 



Legislative Session of 1847-8. 

The Diet of 1847 opened under great excitement. Many of 
the ancient chiefs of the opposition, such as M. Klauzal, Minister 
of Commerce after the revolution, had failed to secure their elec- 
tion ; others, like M. Deak, had withdrawn from political life; 
but a new parliamentary leader had arisen in the person of M. 



64 HUNGARY. 

Kossuth, Who was now for the first time returned to the Diet as 
Deputy for the Comitat of Pesth. M. Kossuth had succeeded in 
his election chiefly through the influence of Count Louis Batthy- 
anyi, who had thrown his weight- into the scale against Count 
Raday, contrary to the advice of many members of the opposition, 
who dreaded and deprecated the presence in the Diet of the idol 
of the young Magyar party. As M. Kossuth was known to be 
personally obnoxious to Count Louis Batthyanyi, the conduct of 
the latter was to many of his friends an enigma, and seemed to 
them only explicable on the supposition that he held all con- 
siderations to be secondary to the success of his plans for the over- 
throw of Count G. Apponyi. 

The Session was likely to be an important one. A series of im- 
portant and highly useful reforms had been enacted by the Diets of 
1836 and 1839, and the Government was now prepared to follow 
them up with several well-considered projects of law on matters of 
great interest ; such as the amendment of the municipal laws, the 
framing of a new criminal code, the modification of the ancient 
system of billeting soldiers on the peasants, the regulation of the 
customs duties, which implied the taxation of the nobles, the 
commutation of labour-rents, and the revision of the law of aviti- 
citas, so as to facilitate the transfer of landed property. The royal 
propositions on these subjects were heard of with delight, and a 
prodigious enthusiasm was excited for the moment by the King 
opening the Diet with a speech in the Magyar language. Aged 
veterans in parliamentary warfare shed tears of joy, and the young 
waved their kalpaksin the air ; and political enemies embraced one 
another in ecstasy, and the feeling was universal in the Diet that 
at last the nationality of Hungary had triumphed. But this 
spirit soon passed away. The measures of the Government were 
violently attacked, and although it was evident that there was a 
majority of original instructions to the Deputies of the Lower 
House favourable to the Government, the Opposition hoped to 
excite a feeling in the counties which would secure in their favour 
a majority of the supplemental instructions. Hence the vehement 
speeches of M. Kossuth on the question of e administrators of 
counties,' to which allusion has been already made. But this, 
and other subjects of furious debate, which had occupied the 



LEGISLATIVE SESSION OF 1847-8. 05 

first three months of the session, were at once laid aside on the 
announcement of the Parisian revolution of February, 1848. 

That event produced an immediate exaltation of feeling at Pres- 
burg, of which M. Kossuth availed himself to propose to the Diet 
an address to the Emperor- King, demanding a separate, inde- 
pendent, and responsible ministry for Hungary, liberty of the press, 
freedom of association, a national guard, and a general representa- 
tion of the nation, &c. ; in fact, the abolition of the ancient sub- 
stantial constitution of Hungary, and the substitution in its place of 
a version of the modern paper-constitutions. It further demanded 
— with remarkable inconsistency, as it claimed to keep itself aloof 
from Austrian affairs — that representative institutions should be 
granted to the other provinces of the Austrian empire. The 
Chamber of Deputies readily adopted the address, although it con- 
tained many propositions contrary to the parliamentary traditions of 
the Opposition ; but a system of terrorism had been adopted by the 
armed mob in the galleries which overawed the timid, whilst the 
careless regarded the address merely as a challenge to the Govern- 
ment, which it would not accept. Szechenyi meanwhile endea- 
voured to bring about a compromise ; but in vain. Apponyi, who 
had become Chancellor, was disabled by ill health from making an 
energetic resistance to the address before it came up to the House 
of Magnates.* The new Palatine, the Archduke Stephen, the 
president of the Upper House, counselled concession, and in the 
midst of the irresolution of the King's government at Presburg, 
the tidings arrived of the events of March at Vienna. The govern- 
ment of Count Apponyi at once resigned on hearing of the retire- 
ment of Prince Metternich, and the address was carried in the 
House of Magnates. 

' Hoc fonte derivata clades 
In patriam populumque fluxit.' 

The circumstances, under which Prince Metternich retired from 
affairs, are detailed in a remarkable work upon the Austrian revolu- 
tion, which has lately appeared at Leipzig under the title of « Genesis 
der Revolution in Oesterreich in Jahre 1848.' The author is now 

* The Chancellor had no seat in the Diet by virtue of his office. This fact amongst 
others serves to show that the existing constitution was not adapted to the exigencies 
of parliamentary government. 



0*6 HUNGARY. 

generally understood to be Count Hartig; but it was at one time 
attributed to M. Pippitz, the private secretary to Count Kolowrath. 
The work is anti-bureaucratic in its spirit, and in that respect the 
writer would seem to belong to the school of Prince Metternich, 
rather than to that of Count Kolowrath. It is worthy of remark that 
the popular notion respecting these two distinguished ministers is 
singularly at variance with the truth. Whatever may have been 
the faults of Prince Metternich as a statesman, the last with which 
he can be reproached is that narrowness of view which often results 
from long-continued official routine ; whilst the Minister of the 
Interior, his colleague, was essentially a bureaucrat, although he 
contrived to escape the reproach of it. On the other hand, the 
umpire, who held the scales of council, as it were, between the 
two Prime Ministers, and turned the balance on most occasions 
in favour of official routine, was the Archduke Louis, on whom 
the duties of sovereignty had devolved after the death of the 
Emperor Francis. In a less responsible post the Archduke Louis 
would have been valued as a man of sterling worth and remark- 
able intelligence ; but he wanted decision and firmness, and these 
defects in his personal character, which were common to his 
brother the Emperor Francis, mainly contributed to produce that 
torpid condition of the Austrian Government which was the occa- 
sion of all its misfortunes. 

The author of the { Genesis ' gives almost as graphic an account 
of the events which led to Prince Metternich's resignation, as 
Count Sternberg in his ' Royalisten' gives of the events of the 
18th of March at Berlin. 

The Austrian Estates were to meet in their Diet on the 10th 
of March, 1848. Copies of M. Kossuth's proposed address had 
meanwhile found their way to Vienna, and considerable excite- 
ment resulted from its circulation in the streets and amongst the 
students of the University; but the President of the Diet, Count 
Montecuccoli, undertook to answer for the tranquillity of Vienna, 
and the maintenance of public order. The storm, however, con- 
tinued to collect, and on the 13th, no precautions having been 
taken against such an event, it burst forth. The Hall of the 
Diet was stormed by the mob, and a petition drawn up under 
their dictation to be presented to the Emperor. Amongst other 



LEGISLATIVE SESSION OF 1847-8. 07 

tilings the freedom of the press was demanded, and it happened 
by a singular coincidence, that the news of the Prussian reforms 
in regard to the Censorship had reached Vienna on the morn- 
ing of the 13th. The Austrian Censorship, as the author of 
the ' Genesis ' observes, had never fulfilled its end, and it was 
resolved in the Council not to contest this demand. The Prince 
Metternich accordingly retired to an adjoining room to draw up 
a reply to the petition to that effect. His momentary absence 
was made use of by the leaders of the movement to demand his 
retirement. They declared in a peremptory tone, that, in order to 
quiet the people, the Prince Metternich must resign his post : — 

' Their noise recalled the Prince to the Council Chamber, and he went 
up to the Archduke in order to ascertain the purport of it. He then learned 
that his retirement was under consideration. It was a moment which put 
to the test the strength of his character. To abandon a position in 
which he had shone for thirty-nine years with the greatest lustre, and dur- 
ing which he had enjoyed the confidence not only of the Imperial family 
but of almost all the reigning sovereigns of Europe, and in which he had 
exerted the most decisive influence on the affairs of the world, — to see 
the clouds of incense with which sincere as well as hypocritical respect 
had enveloped him, dispersed at a moment, — to reap ingratitude for 
incessant endeavours to promote the interest of the state and the hap- 
piness of its inhabitants — this was calculated to excite such painful feel- 
ings in the breast of a grey-haired veteran, that no one could have 
been surprised if he had been overwhelmed by them. But such was not 
the case. With unshaken firmness and dignified composure he declared 
that " the aim of his life had been to toil for the welfare of the monarchy. 
If it was thought that his remaining at his post would endanger the 
monarchy, it would be no sacrifice on his part to surrender it." He 
thereupon turned round to the Archduke Louis with the announce- 
ment that he resigned his post to the Emperor, at the same time that 
he addressed the most prominent persons of the mixed company which 
besieged the chamber of the Archduke, in words full of meaning. 
" I know it will be said, that in retiring from my post I have carried 
away with me the monarchy. Against such an idea I decidedly pro- 
test. Neither myself, nor anybody else, has shoulders broad enough to 
bear away a State upon them. States only disappear when they betray 
themselves." '—pp. 176-7. 

The Hungarian deputation, which carried up the address to 
the Emperor- King at Schonbrunn, returned to Presburg in 



68 HUNGARY. 

triumph, and Count Louis Batthydnyi was charged to form an 
independent Hungarian ministry. His party, however, had not 
yet given up their efforts to obtain further concessions from the 
King. They were most desirous to establish separate Ministries 
of War and Finance, in order to break up the united Austro- 
Hungarian army, and at the same time to get the control of the 
public purse. The Crown conceded a separate Ministry of 
Finance, but it evaded the rest of their prayer by appointing 
a Minister of Internal Defence, whose functions remained unde- 
fined. The Cabinet was at last formed ; but it was made up of 
very heterogeneous elements. Batthyanyi and Kossuth were the 
chiefs of the revolution. Deak, KlauzaL, and Eotvos belonged 
to the old Opposition party. M. Szemere was a man of a decided 
party position, but had not openly avowed his leaning to the Social 
and Democratic Republic. Count Szechenyi had joined the go- 
vernment with the hopes of acting as a mediator ; and through his 
influence, and from motives very similar, Prince Paul Ester- 
hazy, well known in England, accepted the office of attendant 
Minister on the person of the King. 

Nothing, indeed, shows more clearly the distinct character of 
the later period of the Hungarian revolution than the fate of this 
ministry. Prince Paul Esterhazy tendered his resignation in 
September, 1848. Count Szechenyi became insane on seeing the 
misfortunes inevitably impending over his country, which he was 
powerless to avert. Baron Eotvos was obliged for his personal safety 
to fly from Hungary after the events which ended with the massacre 
of Count Lamberg; whilst Deak and Klauzal retired into private life, 
when they became satisfied that M. Kossuth intended to continue 
the civil war at all hazards, by withdrawing with a section of the 
Diet to Debreczin. There was one other individual who did not join 
the ministry at its first formation — M. Meszaros. A Colonel in the 
army of Radetzky in Italy, he refused at first to accept the post of 
Minister of Internal Defence, until the Emperor- King expressly 
commanded him to undertake its duties. During the summer of 
1848 he introduced a bill for raising new levies, which was per- 
fectly consistent with the unity of the A ustro- Hungarian army; 
but when that was rejected by the majority of the Lower House, 
forgetful alike of the first principles of parliamentary government 



THE CROATIAN MOVEMENT. 69 

and of the spirit of the army to which he belonged, he submitted 
his own sense of duty to the will of the majority, and brought in 
a new project for establishing a separate Hungarian army. If 
M. Meszaros had only on this occasion had sufficient firmness to 
remain true to his own convictions, and retired from office, he 
would have clearly defined the respective positions of the ministry 
and the army, and his example would not have led astray so many 
of his comrades. 

The Croatian Movement. 

It becomes necessary here to discuss briefly a question which 
by force of circumstances came to exert a great influence over the 
destinies of Hungary, and which has been exposed to considerable 
misapprehension as well as to misrepresentation. The Croatian 
movement had a character of its own perfectly independent of the 
events of 1848, although it subsequently became mixed up with 
the general Sclavonic movement. The union of the kingdoms of 
Croatia and Sclavonia with the Crown of Hungary had always been 
of a very anomalous and vague character. The despotic innova- 
tions of Joseph II. had forced those States in self-defence to 
cling closer to Hungary, and the Croatian Executive had in con- 
sequence transferred many of its functions to the Council at Buda. 
But the local Croatian Diet still sat occasionally, although deputies 
from the three Sclavonic counties and the kingdom of Croatia 
attended the General Diet of Presburg. The course of discussion 
and legislation in the general Diet subsequently to the year 1825 
had produced symptoms of a strong reaction against the Hungarian 
connexion, both in that provincial assembly and among the Croa- 
tian Deputies. The violence of the Magyar propaganda, by which 
the Magyar language was imposed as the language of the State upon 
all the nationalities of Hungary, gave rise to a new element of 
agitation among all the Sclavonic races. It ought not to be for- 
gotten that there was a strong religious element originally mixed 
up in the political question, so that nothing was wanting to embitter 
the dispute whenever the long-united kingdoms should come openly 
into collision. The affair of the Turopolyan nobles in 1842 had 
given great umbrage to the Croatians ; and party spirit ran so hio-h 
in the Diet of 1843-4 at Presburg, that the Ban of Croatia, Count 



70 HUNGARY. 

Haller, exchanged pistol-shots in a duel with Count Ladislas 
Teleki, The Chancellor meanwhile, Count Mailath, unable to 
resolve upon any decided course of action, contented himself with 
issuing fruitless Commissions of Inquiry ; and at last the dismissal 
of Count Haller himself, under the circumstances, tended to 
aggravate rather than alleviate the difficulties. 

The appointment of the Baron von Jellachich as his successor 
took place before the Hungarian Ministry of the 11th of April, 
1848, was definitively formed. It was officially announced in the 
'Wiener Zeitung' of the 28th of March. This circumstance, 
as the author of the ' Genesis ' (pp. 243-4) observes, disposes of 
the assertion in the Hungarian Manifesto, that 

' this appointment was the first breach of faith that the Austrian Go- 
vernment committed against the Hungarian Ministry, who were not 
consulted, and whose counter-signature was necessary to confirm the 
choice of the Ban. The appointment of Jellachich was the act of an 
abolished system.' 

The Hungarian Ministry alluded to in this passage had no 
legal existence at the time of his appointment, and the ancient 
constitutional system, which required only the advice of the Palatine 
to he ashed, was as yet not abolished. The Palatine's advice was 
in due form asked by the Crown on this occasion, and no objec- 
tion was ever raised by the Diet or the Ministry at Presburg 
against the legality of the appointment. It is certainly strange 
that the Ministry should have remained silent for a whole year, 
and then for the first time have issued a protest from Paris 
through the medium of the Leipzig press. 

The nomination of Jellachich was a concession to the energetic 
petitions of the Croatian nation, and his influence was exerted to 
moderate rather than to exaggerate their demands. The Croatian 
feeling, however, received a fresh impulse from the events of April 
at Presburg. It was clear that the abrogation of the ancient order 
of government in Hungary had opened a wide door for the preten- 
sions of the non-Magyar nationalities, and the Croatian nation- 
ality in the person of its Ban gave the greatest disquietude to 
the new Ministry. Had the Ministry been able and disposed to 
pursue a temperate policy, affairs might possibly have taken a 
different turn. But it was evident that a responsible central 
ministry could not well co-exist with the local self-government 



THE CROATIAN MOVEMENT. 71 

of the counties, and it'was consequently determined by the Bat- 
thyanyi- Kossuth party to set aside the local institutions by & par- 
liamentary coup d'etat. The Deputies of the Lower House were 
accordingly worked up to renounce their character of county-de- 
legates, and to constitute themselves the representatives of the 
nation. Having assumed this new character, they at once threw 
over those who had elected them, and proceeded to vote laws with- 
out having sought the previous instructions of the constituencies. 
The wedge being thus let in, the ultra party determined to drive 
it home. They declared the chief magistrates of the counties to 
be removable at the pleasure of the government (Art. XXIX.), 
and whilst they suspended the meetings of the county-congrega- 
tions for the election of magistrates, they substituted permanent 
committees for the administration of county business, until the 
next diet should have made further dispositions (Arts. XVI. and 
XVII.). It was evident that the political existence of the king- 
doms of Croatia and Sclavonia and Dalmatia was at an end, 
if these changes which abrogated their ancient constitution could 
be effected without their consent having been asked ; and the people 
which refused to submit to Joseph II. was not likely to bow them- 
selves down before M. Kossuth, more particularly after the latter 
had declared with singular tact and taste in the face of the 
Croatian deputies, that ( their country was so contemptibly small, 
that he could swallow it for his breakfast.' The Ban represented 
the national feeling of his countrymen at the commencement of 
the revolution; he further represented, as events succeeded 
each other, the spirit of that military power which Dr. Schiitte 
in his journal of the events of October in Vienna has described 
as * so extraordinary, being neither Bohemian, nor Moravian, nor 
Silesian, nor Croatian, nor Hungarian, nor Italian ; but Im- 
perial, Royal, and Austrian : a military which knew no other 
master or ruler than the monarch whom it had sworn to serve.' 

It has been sought to attach a great mystery to the conduct of 
the Ban during the summer of 1848, and there are writers who 
have gone so far as to charge him with being the tool of a per- 
fidious Camarilla. If the case had been such as alleged by 
these writers, the Ban certainly played his part with singularly 
bad address, for he disavowed all authority from the Emperor 






72 HUNGARY. 

at a moment, when one word in the opposite direction would have 
secured for him the success which he was not strong enough to 
master by force of arms. When the Ban crossed the Drave in 
September, 1848, on his march towards Pesth, several officers of 
an Hungarian army-corps, which had been dispatched to oppose 
his progress, came to his quarters and begged him to declare 
whether he had any orders from the King, as in case that 
he could satisfy them that he had such authority, although only 
given to him by word of mouth, they were prepared not to oppose 
him. The Ban's reply was, ' that he had no orders from the 
Emperor — that he was acting without any authority from him, 
and on his own responsibility — but that he believed that he was 
acting for the true interests of his country and his sovereign, 
and in conformity to the feelings of the army to which he 
gloried to belong.' The result was, that the Ban found himself too 
weak to march upon Pesth, as, by reason of his frank declara- 
tion, he was not joined by the regiments which he had expected 
to flock to his standard ; and his admissions on this occasion 
were further made use of by the Hungarian ministers, and cir- 
culated widely in the journals of Pesth, as an argument for oppos- 
ing the Ban. It is unreasonable for parties, who have had all 
the benefit from the assumed truth of his confession, to turn 
round and claim to derive benefit from its supposed falsehood. 
The Emperor-King was in fact during the summer of 1848 in 
an exceptional position : he had no power to enforce his wishes — 
he could only give advice ; and it is evident that the Ban con- 
sidered his sovereign to be under duress, and determined to act 
upon his own convictions. It is not necessary to seek in the 
falsehood of individuals on such occasions an explanation of their 
conduct, when the falseness of their position inevitably entailed 
an inconsistency of action. 

The new laws of 1848, far from bringing an end to the revo- 
lution, contained the germs of new troubles. The question was 
mooted in the Diet on the propriety of granting aid from Hungary 
to the Emperor against Sardinia. The moderate section of the 
ministry, Eotvos, Szechenyi, &c, maintained the affirmative; Count 
Louis Batthyanyi inclined to their view ; but M. Kossuth was again 
the evil genius of the Cabinet, and he persuaded his colleagues 



THE CKOATIAN MOVEMENT. 73 

not to acknowledge the obligation of the King of Hungary to 
defend the hereditary States of the House of Austria. Not only 
was this in direct contravention to the Act of Settlement of 1723 ;* 
but even the laws of April, 1848, Art. III. § 2, had provided that 
" the unity of the Crown and the links of the union of the Mo- 
narchy should be maintained." The spirit of separatism was now 
rife in the counsels of the ministry, and in the deliberations of 
the Diet. The latter declared that Hungary would not go to the 
aid of Austria in case of a conflict with the new Central Power 
at Francfort ; they welcomed with open arms deserters from the 
regiments in Galicia ; and they ultimately recalled the Hungarian 
regiments which were serving under Radetzky in Italy. Mean- 
while the law which had been passed in so unconstitutional a 
manner for the abolition of labour-rents had stripped the landed 
proprietors of half their revenue. It was probably thought that 
this measure of spoliation would enable the vessel of the new 
State to ride at double anchor, as the immediate interests of 
the peasants were thereby identified with the cause of the revolu- 
tion, and the future interests of the nobles might seem to be iden- 
tified with the support of a ministry which undertook to provide 
them with a legal compensation. 

The circumstances under which this law was passed have been 
already alluded to in a cursory manner (supra, p. 38). They 
deserve to be narrated. The commutation of the Robot, or rent 
of the urbarial lands, payable by the peasant-tenant in labour, 
had been under consideration in the Diet, but it was most diffi- 
cult to devise a legislative substitute for it in a country of which 
the industry was almost exclusively agricultural, and in which 
the proprietor of the land was already glutted with produce. M. 
Szentkiralyi, the colleague of M. Kossuth in the deputation of 
Pesth, determined at last to cut the Gordian knot by abolishing 
the whole of the labour-rents at one sweep, leaving to his suc- 
cessors the task of providing the substitute. No sooner was this 
proposition laid on the table of the Lower House than rumours 
were circulated of the rising of the peasants, and the bill was 
hastily passed under the joint influence of the terrorism exercised 

* Art. II. recites : " Profile stabilienda in omnem casum etiam contra vim externam, 
cum vicinis regnis et provinciis haereditai iis unione, et conservanda domestica tran- 
quillitate." 

F 



74 HUNGARY. 

by the galleries and the alarm of an impending Jacquerie. An 
extraordinary evening sitting of the Upper House was thereupon 
summoned, where but few of its members appeared, as it had 
been announced in the morning that the House would not meet 
again till the following day. It will hardly be credited that a 
House of not more than twenty-five to thirty members was called 
upon to decide a question off hand which involved the confisca- 
tion of half the property in Hungary. In vain did the Chief 
Justice propose the adjournment of the discussion; in vain was 
the bill contested paragraph by paragraph, and full powers offered 
to the Minister to put down any insurrectionary movements. The 
bill which the Lower House had sent up was carried,* and copies 
of it were at once sent off to Pesth with a deputation charged 
to distribute it in all directions. The sanction of the Crown 
was thus forestalled, as it were, and the reconsideration of the 
measure rendered impossible. 

The Revolution and its Phases. 

The revolution divides itself into three very distinct periods. 
The first, which comprised the address and the laws of April, had 
acquired a sort of post factum validity, though the assent of the 
Crown could hardly be held to cure the illegal origin of laws 
to which the consent of the country in its congregations had never 
been obtained. The second period commences with the opening 
of the new Diet at Pesth, in June, 1848, and concludes with the 
migration of the Committee of Defence after the dissolution of ' 
the Diet to Debreczin (January, 1849). The third period was 
a state of open and undisguised rebellion, and includes the de- 
position of the House of Hapsburg- Lorraine (April 14, 1849). 

The circumstance which produced at last an open rupture 
between the King and the new Ministry was the refusal of the 
Crown in August, 1848, to sanction two laws : one for the esta- 

* A bill of M. Lonyay's to enforce a commutation, which had passed the Lower 
House in December, 1847, had been rejected in the Upper House on the motion of 
Baron Vay on February 3rd, 1848. The Abolition-bill, which was now carried, 
was brought in and passed through both Houses in the short space of twelve hours on 
March 18th, 1848, under the auspices of the new Minister-President, Batthy;myi. It 
became law on April 11th, 1848. 



THE REVOLUTION AND ITS PHASES. 75 

blishment of a separate army;* the other for the issue of twenty 
millions of paper florins. The Batthyanyi-Kossuth cabinet had 
thereupon resigned. The Diet meanwhile authorized M. Kossuth, 
who did not hesitate to resume his post at its request, to put both 
these measures into execution, precisely as if they had become law, 
in direct violation of the 4th Article of the New Constitution, 
which made the sanction of the Crown a necessary condition ; 
and certainly no Minister of Finance ever made bolder use of 
paper money than M. Kossuth. His letter from Szegedin, 
written at a late period of the war, July 16, 1849, to General Bern, 
might almost seem to have been composed with the faith of a man, 
who was totally unaware of the atrocious fraud which he was 
hourly perpetrating on a simple peasantry, were it not that a 
decree had been issued at an early period by M. Szemere, enforcing 
the circulation of the Kossuth notes under the penalty of death. 

" I beg of you to have a little patience. I repeat that I am not a 
God. I can die for the country, but I have not the gift of creating. 
In three days the presses will be in order, and then I will send to your 
cashier 200,000 florins a-week. You demand 800,000 florins in pieces 
of 30 and 1 5 kreutzers. I beg of you to remark that, as we only work 
with 20 hand-presses, it would take 33 days' labour to produce that 
sum, which is only the tenth of our monthly expenses." 

The events which shortly afterwards led to the massacre of Count 
Lamberg, cannot be altogether passed over. A collision was at this 
time almost inevitable between the Croatian and Hungarian armies; 
and the Crown, which had hitherto been content (in accordance 
with its old traditional policy) to mediate in the quarrels of its 
subjects without associating itself with either party, determined at 
last to adopt a more energetic policy, and appointed Count Lam- 
berg generalissimo of all the troops in Hungary and the de- 
pendent kingdoms, in order to prevent the possibility of a conflict. 
The effect of his mission would have been, if anything, unfavour- 
able to the Ban, for it would have checked him in his career, 
and at once rescued the revolutionary party at Pesth from im- 
minent danger. Count Lamberg accordingly set out for Pesth 

* A levy of 200,000 men was decreed ; they were termed ' Ilonvcd, 1 or 'Defenders 
of the Country,' and were quite a distinct force from the national yeomanry, or Insur- 
rection, which the king alone could summon into the field. 



76 HUNGARY. 

on his mission of mediation, carrying with him a manifesto ad- 
dressed by the King himself to " his people of Hungary,"* which 
was found upon the Count's person after his death. It is true 
that his appointment was not countersigned by any responsible 
Hungarian minister ; but the Batthyanyi- Kossuth Cabinet had 
shortly before resigned — Batthyanyi, who had been commis- 
sioned to form a new Ministry, had not completed his task 
— and Lamberg had not as yet proceeded to a single act by 
virtue of the King's appointment : on the contrary, he came 
expressly to Pesth to obtain the counter-signature of Batthyanyi, 
and that counter-signature would have been readily given, if the 
declarations subsequently published by Batthyanyi himself in the 
Allgemeine Oesterreichisch Zeitung are to be believed. But it 
is not quite clear why Batthyanyi, who was aware of Count 
Lamberg's mission, withdrew from Pesth on the 27th September, 
and so gave the Diet an opportunity to declare his mission illegal 
because his appointment was not properly countersigned. That 
declaration most assuredly paved the way to the murder of the 
King's Commissioner on the 28th ; and it is impossible to assent to 
the Hungarian manifesto, where it states that " Count Lamberg's 
death should be considered as a fact in itself." The Diet must 
accept the responsibility of initiating the outrage ; and it certainly 
failed to seize the occasion to repudiate the sanguinary sentiment 
of M. Irenyi, when he described it in the Lower House as " a mere 
mistake of form." 

Upon the murder of Count Lamberg, Batthyanyi, Eotvos, and 
even the Baron Wesselenyi, the O'Connell of Transylvania, as he 
has been termed, left the country. It would have been happy for 
the chief of the late ministry, if he had firmly persisted in acting 
upon his own convictions as to the tendency of the course to which 
the Diet henceforth stood committed. The party of M. Kossuth 
now constituted themselves a standing Committee of National 
Defence with the sanction of the Diet, and assumed the reins of 
government. The Baron Vay, on the other hand, was called by 
the King from Transylvania to form a new Ministry, and, until 

* This manifesto, which attracted considerable attention by its tone, is published in 
the authorized ' Collection of Manifestos and Proclamations for Hungary.' Ofen, 
1819. 



THE REVOLUTION AND ITS PHASES. 77 

his .arrival, Baron Recsey was charged with the functions of interim 
Prime Minister. It would have been suicidal for the Crown to 
temporise any longer with the revolution, and accordingly the Diet 
was dissolved (Oct. 3rd) by a Royal Ordinance, and the Ban 
appointed to take the command of all the King's forces in Hungary. 
Both these ordinances were countersigned by Baron Recsey. It 
has been said that the appointment of Baron Recsey was not legal 
in point of form, as the Prime Minister, according to the new law 
of April, 1848, ought to have been nominated, in the absence of 
the King, by the Palatine- Viceroy, subject to the ratification of 
the King. But at this time there was no Palatine : — the Archduke 
Stephen had resigned ; the Ministry likewise had resigned ; and 
according to this doctrine, no government could have been formed 
until the election of a new Palatine, which in its turn had become 
impossible in the absence of a ministry to propose to the Diet 
candidates for election to that office ! 

The barbarous murder of the Imperial Minister of War at 
Vienna, which was almost immediately consequent, is connected 
with this page of the Hungarian revolution. The Diet at 
Vienna had formally refused, after a lengthened discussion, to 
receive the Deputation from the Hungarian Diet. It had sub- 
sequently, when the question of the intercepted correspondence 
between the Ban and the Austrian Minister at War was brought 
forward and debated in the Constituent Assembly, declared itself, 
by an almost unanimous vote, fully satisfied with the explanation 
furnished by Count Latour. It is thus clear that there was no con- 
stitutional cause of dissatisfaction at Vienna against the Minister 
of War : the insurrection therefore of the 6th of October was as 
much directed against the Diet elected by universal suffrage as 
against the Government, and consequently was a purely anarchical 
movement. What degree of foreign influence may have directed 
its course of proceeding is still obscure^ but thus much is certain, 
that after its success, the chief demands of its leaders insisted 
upon the revocation of the Ordinance appointing Jellachich, 
which did not concern Austria at all. Further, amongst the papers 
officially published by the Austrian Government, and printed in 
the Wiener Zeitung, there were three letters addressed by M. 
Kossuth's acknowledged agent at Vienna to General Messen- 



78 HUNGARY. 

hauser and others, promising the support of the Hungarian arms 
to the revolutionary cause. If this was not an overt act of treason 
against the King of Hungary, it was at all events a proximate act 
of hostility against the Emperor. 

Invasion of the Austrian Territory and Battle of 
Schwechat. 

But there was still some hesitation in the councils of the 
Hungarians. The insurrection at Vienna had been put down by 
Prince Windischgratz. Their army had meanwhile advanced 
towards the frontier, and now stood at Parendorf. Its commander, 
General Moga, and the chiefs of his staff, were averse to cross the 
frontier. They were fully alive to the perilous consequences of 
an aggressive movement against Austria, and their convictions 
were shared by Pazmandy, the Speaker of the Lower House, and 
other influential persons; but M. Kossuth arrived at the camp 
on the 24th of October, and decided a council of war in favour of 
an immediate advance upon Vienna.* The Leytha, the Rubicon 
of Hungary, was accordingly passed on the 27th ; and the battle 
of Schwechat, which was fought on Austrian ground on the 30th, 
and proved disastrous to the Hungarian arms, gave a new phase 
to the contest, and engrafted an international war upon a contest 
for political mastery. 

Abdication of Ferdinand and Accession of 
Francis Joseph I. 

Preparations for a decisive struggle now commenced on both 
sides, and the result was the winter campaign of Prince Windisch- 
gratz and his advance upon Pesth, which he entered in the begin- 
ning of January, 1849. M. Kossuth and the Committee of Defence 
thereupon withdrew beyond the Theiss, having vainly endea- 
voured to make terms with the Imperial General. Meanwhile 
the Emperor Ferdinand, who had been driven a second time from 
his imperial residence, after granting nearly every demand which 

* M. Kossuth's main argument seems to have been that a victory would decide the 
fate of the Austrian monarchy and all Germany, whilst a defeat would only stimulate 
the Hungarian nation to further sacrifices ' 



ABDICATION OF FERDINAND. 79 

his subjects had submitted to him, whose old and faithful Minister 
of War had been murdered almost under his eyes, and who had 
witnessed a civil war raging close to his capital, had abdicated his 
crown (Dec. 2, 1848), which had become to his gentle nature a 
crown of thorns. The immediate heir of the throne, the Archduke 
Francis Charles, at once imitated his example, and the crown 
thereupon passed over to the next heir, who, notwithstanding his 
youth, had been so popular in Hungary in 1847, that M. Kossuth 
himself, before the abdication of Ferdinand, had actually sug- 
gested, as a measure of compromise, that he should be declared 
Co-Regent of Flungary. 

It has been sought to maintain the position that the abdication 
of Ferdinand was not a legal act, and that his successor is " no 
more than a foreign pretender " to the throne of Hungary. The 
language of the manifesto published in the name of the Hun- 
garian Government is clear upon this head : — 

" According to the terms of the Hungarian Constitution, the consent 
of the nation is necessary to release the King from the duties attached 
to the possession of the throne. It is the nation represented by the 
Diet which appoints a Government when the reigning King is no 
longer competent to fulfil the duties of sovereignty. The Hungarian 
Diet has not however been consulted by the abdicating King ; and 
under what circumstances have they refused to consult the Diet ? — 
When Ferdinand, in giving the Crown to a prince who was not the 
direct heir, changed the order of succession to the throne, a change 
which is never effected even in absolute countries by virtue of the 
royal will alone. The Hungarian Diet, therefore, was strictly within 
the limits of its right, in declaring Ferdinand's decrees for this pur- 
pose null and void." 

The false reasoning which pervades the above passage is 
transparent. It is one thing for a king to remain in possession 
of a throne ; it is another for him to abdicate : it is one thing 
for a Diet to legislate when a prince incompetent to fulfil the 
duties of sovereignty continues to hold the throne ; it is another 
for it to be consulted when he resigns. It may be perfectly true 
that the laws of Flungary have provided for the emergency of a 
Regency. The Palatine, for instance, is, ex officio, Regent of the 
Kingdom. It does not however fallow that the Diet has esta- 



80 HUNGARY. 

Wished any form of abdication, and all inquiry after any such 
form has been fruitless. Again, the order of succession cannot 
be said to be changed, when the heir presumptive waives his title 
in favour of his own son, the next in the legitimate order of 
succession, as established by the Pragmatic Sanction and con- 
firmed by the Diet of 1723 {supra, p. 52). But the same mani- 
festo goes on to state that, — 

" According to the terms of the constitution, the right of the sove- 
reignty in Hungary rests upon a reciprocal treaty concluded between 
the people and the sovereign — a treaty by which the latter only re- 
ceives the crown in exchange for his oaths to observe the laws. Thus 
the act of coronation alone confers the title and capacity of King in 
Hungary. The Emperor Francis Joseph, claiming Hungary in the 
name of the rights that he pretends to hold from his uncle, and without 
having concluded with the Hungarian people the compact which alone 
confers the crown, is no more than a foreign pretender undertaking the 
conquest of a free and independent country." 

Now the form of the coronation-oath is contained in the Decree 
of 1715, and the substance of the oath was, that the king would 
observe the ancient laws and customs of the country, and would 
maintain the privileges of the nobles in strict accordance with the 
decrees of Andreas II The Act of Settlement of 1723, which re- 
gulated the succession according to the Pragmatic Sanction, refers 
specifically to this oath as the form to be observed by the suc- 
cessors of Charles VI. There is no doubt, that an uncrowned 
king did not enjoy all the privileges under the ancient constitu- 
tion which the acceptance of the crown of St. Stephen conveyed 
(supra, p. 44), but the ancient constitution itself was abolished, and 
the laws which the coronation-oath bound the king to observe, were 
no longer recognized by the authors of the manifesto. Joseph II. 
had refused to take this very coronation -oath because he would 
not oblige himself to maintain the ancient constitution. It is 
strange to contend that the oath is still to be taken, although the 
ancient constitution has itself been abolished ! 

The parties who did not consider the compact implied in the 
coronation-oath binding upon King Ferdinand, so as to preclude 
him from lawfully consenting to the abolition of the ancient con- 
stitution, are singularly inconsistent in maintaining that his sue- 



DISSENSIONS AMONGST THE HUNGARIAN LEADERS. 81 

cessor has no title until he has ratified " the reciprocal treaty," 
which it is no longer in his power to enter into, if the act of his 
predecessor is binding upon him. The first article of the Decree 
of 1723 is decisive the other way, that the legitimate heir of the 
House of Austria is by the same hereditary right indefeasible 
King of Hungary, and entitled to be crowned as such {supra, p. 
52). As to the act of coronation, it seems to be a double mockery 
to carry off the crown of St. Stephen, and then gravely insist upon 
the king's title being incomplete without it. 

Dissensions amongst the Hungarian Leaders. 

The Committee of Defence had no sooner abandoned Pesth 
than it became evident that there was dissension in the Hungarian 
councils. General Gorgey seems to have been the exponent of the 
ultra-independent feeling of the Magyar squirearchy, and he pro- 
claimed at once on his arrival at Waitzen, that he was in arms for 
the laws of April, 1848, and the lawful king Ferdinand V., and 
that the army would defend the country independently of all other 
authority. M. Kossuth, on the other hand, and the Committee 
of Defence rather personified the Juraten or law-pleaders, a class 
of petty gentry peculiar to Hungary, who had a negative political 
position under the ancient constitution, and exhibited a democratic 
bias from the first days of the Revolution. This party had adopted 
the services of the Polish General Dembinsky, and declared him 
Commander-in-Chief of the Hungarian armies. They failed, 
however, to secure more than the temporary submission of Gorgey. 
The latter, after the battle of Kapolna, deprived Dembinsky of 
his command, and M. Kossuth was for a time content to make 
the political subordinate to the military question, for Gorgey's 
influence with the hussars was incontestable, and the fate of the 
revolution clearly depended upon the success of the main army 
under his command. The manoeuvres of that army were most 
skilfully conducted ; for although the Austrian generals maintained 
possession of the field on most occasions, the engagements 
being chiefly those of cavalry and artillery, as the Hungarian 
infantry seldom ventured out of the woods, yet they found them- 
selves obliged to fall back upon Pesth to anticipate Gorgey's ap- 



$i HUNGAEY. 

parent intention of attacking the capital. The Austrians were 
now in hopes of Gorgey accepting battle in the neighbourhood 
of Pesth, but Gorgey confined himself to skirmishing with his 
artillery and cavalry, and in the mean time withdrew the greater 
part of his army over the hills. 

When the result of this manoeuvre was discovered, it was at 
once supposed that Gorgey meant to strike a blow at Vienna, and 
he has been reproached for not having at once marched upon 
that city. But Gorgey's approach to Comorn indirectly led to the 
defeat of any such object, if he ever seriously entertained the idea.* 
The blockading corps round Comorn was obliged to break up, 
and it fell back towards Presburg, calling in its detachments as it 
retired. Besides, when General Welden left General Henzi in 
Buda on the 18th of April, it was expected that the Russian army 
would be in the field early in May, and that he would be enabled 
to return and relieve Henzi within three weeks. Had Gorgey 
at that time marched upon Vienna, he would have acted much 
the same part as King Charles- Albert when he pushed for- 
ward the left wing of his army by Novara and Magenta upon 
Milan : he would have sacrificed the strategical to the political 
idea. He might have won Vienna, but he would have certainly 
lost Hungary. Besides, the capture of Vienna at that moment 
would have been little more than a coup de theatre. The Em- 
peror was at Olmutz. The armies of his ally were on their 
march : they had halted, it is true, to make their commissariat 
complete, but their columns were already directed upon Upper 
Hungary and Debreczin; and Gorgey, if he had outmanoeuvred 
General Welden at Presburg, would have had an Austrian army 
in his rear and a Russian army on his flank. Jt is true that 
Gorgey's infantry was comparatively the flower of that branch of 
the Hungarian forces, but the Honved were essentially raw levies, 
a totally different class of men from the Hussars, and could not be 
safely relied upon to win a hard-fought battle in the open plains. 

* It is said that Gorgey did entertain the idea of marching upon Vienna, until he 
received orders from Debreczin to detach 10,000 men against Buda, and take that 
fortress, coute qui coute. 



DEPOSITION OF THE HOUSE OF HAPSBUKG-LOKRAINE. 83 

Deposition of the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine. 

But the revolution itself bad meanwhile entered upon a new 
phase. Almost simultaneously with the recall of Prince Windisch- 
gratz, a declaration was issued from Debreczin (April 14, 1849), 
announcing that the House of Hapsburg-Lorraine was for ever 
excluded from the united thrones of Hungary and Transylvania, 
and proclaiming M. Kossuth Governor of Hungary. No special 
form of government seems to have been fixed, but M. Szemere, the 
right hand of M. Kossuth, and the Governor's Prime Minister, 
declared that he would not shrink from any consequences of 
the Social and Democratic Republic. Common prudence would 
have suggested the expediency of the party at Debreczin not avow- 
ing a policy so much at variance with the national feeling of the 
Hungarians. Perhaps the boundary had been already passed 
where the dictates of prudence might be listened to ; but it is 
difficult to understand on what grounds M. Kossuth is not to ac- 
cept the responsibility of his Minister's declaration. The expla- 
nations hitherto advanced by his friends are not in keeping with 
their professed opinion of his political capacity. 

The promulgation of the Austrian constitution of the 4th of 
March has been alleged as an excuse for the declaration of De- 
breczin. It would seem more correct to speak of it as the occa- 
sion of the declaration, for the latter was the logical sequence of 
the measures upon which M. Kossuth embarked when he assumed 
the government against the King's authority in October, 1848. 
M. Kossuth undoubtedly intended to pledge the country not to 
make terms with the King, but the effect of the declaration was 
to strengthen the hands of the peace-party, and to constitute the 
Generals the sole powers with whom the King could henceforth 
negotiate. 

A fter the Russian armies had once crossed the frontier, General 
Gorgey seems to have been fully aware that " the game was up/' 
according to the language of his letter to General Riidiger. 
Meanwhile he kept his army in the neighbourhood of Comorn, 
with the view apparently of making that citadel the basis of 
offensive operations, if an opportunity for them should present 
itself, at the same time that its walls would afford him shelter 



84 HUNGARY. 

against any overwhelming force. M. Kossuth and the Govern- 
ment were now at Pesth, having been obliged to retire from 
Debreczin before the advance of Marshal Paskiewitch ; but they 
could not remain there long, as the Russian division under General 
Paniutin effected, by the 25th of June, its junction with General 
Haynau, and the Austrians at last resumed the offensive. The 
battle of Raab, which followed on the 26th, and in which the 
united Austro-Russian army succeeded in outflanking Gorgey, 
may be considered to have morally decided the result, although 
the struggle was kept up for six weeks longer. 

The Conclusion of the War. 

The battle of Raab has just been spoken of as conclusive 
of the fate of the campaign, for the Hungarians there came 
into conflict with the Russian infantry, and were compelled to 
retreat before it. It was idle therefore to suppose that Gorgey 
could venture to confront the main army of Paskiewitch in 
the plains of the Upper Theiss; besides, it was clearly the 
game of the Hungarians to exhaust, if possible, the Russian 
commissariat, as no supplies could be obtained by the invading 
army in Hungary itself. Two plans accordingly presented them- 
selves. Gorgey might either establish himself amongst the moun- 
tains of Upper Hungary, which Paskiewitch seems most to have 
apprehended, in which case,, with Comorn as a point d'appui, he 
might have maintained a long defence ; or he might cross the 
Danube and march southward, adopting a Scythian mode of war- 
fare, which the Austrians appear principally to have feared, and 
availing himself of the resources of a country which had hitherto 
suffered comparatively little from the ravages of w T ar. Gorgey 
determined on the latter course, which would probably have di- 
verted the Austrian Generals from executing their preconcerted 
plan of combined operations with the main Russian army ; and if 
he could but have succeeded in outmanoeuvring his pursuers, 
he might have effected unexpectedly a junction with the southern 
Hungarian army between the Theiss and the Danube, and so 
have come into action with advantage against the advanced de- 
tachments of the enemy. M. Kossuth, on the other hand, and 



THE CONCLUSION OF THE WAR. *. 85 

his Council took a different view, and sent orders to Gorgey to join 
the divisions of Dembinsky and Visoczsky on the north bank of 
the Danube, and give battle forthwith to the main army of Paskie- 
witch. Gorgey, however, declined to sacrifice himself and his 
army to these orders; and M. Kossuth accordingly proceeded to 
deprive him of the chief command, and with this object dispatched 
Meszaros and Dembinsky to Comorn to supersede him ; but 
Gorgey had meanwhile repulsed, on the 2nd of July, a combined 
attack of the Austrians and Russians, and it was hardly an oppor- 
tune moment for the civil authority to step in and deprive the army 
of a chief on whom it doated, and who was for the moment dis- 
abled by a wound which he had received in leading it on to the 
assault. The two Generals accordingly thought it advisable to 
abandon their mission and return to Pesth. It has been said that 
they were unable to penetrate through the positions which the 
Russians occupied on the north and the Austrians on the south 
bank of the Danube, and that for that reason they renounced their 
mission. Thus much is certain, that the conduct of the Pro- 
visional Government on this occasion provoked a declaration from 
Gorgey's officers that they would serve under no other com- 
mander-in-chief. 

Gorgey now proceeded to execute his plan of crossing the 
Danube, and breaking through the enemy's lines on the southern 
bank; but the action of the 11th July * was conclusively fatal 
to his design, as he was repulsed, after a hard day's fight, by the 
Austrians and Russians, and was obliged to abandon all hope of 
forcing a passage in that direction. He thereupon left a strong 
garrison in Comorn, as the fortress was likely to be completely 
enveloped by the besieging forces, and he suddenly made his 
appearance with the bulk of his army (44.000 men) at Waitzen. 
PI ere indeed he succeeded in driving back the advanced guard of 
the Russians under General Sass, according to the Hungarian 
accounts ; but he found it impracticable to force a passage through 
Paskiewitch's centre, owing to its overwhelming superiority of 

* The battle of July 11th physically decided the war, although that of Temeswar 
was required to settle it. The notices of the campaign are at present fragmentary, 
and chiefly from Hungarian sources, but a complete account of the operations of each 
army-corps is reported to be soon forthcoming. 




SQ 



HUNGARY. 



numbers. He thereupon determined on executing his extraordi- 
nary march by a route unobserved by the Russians, through 
Losoncz and Tokay to Debreczin, and thence to Grosswardein 
and Arad, where he arrived on the 10th of August, with his 
troops in a most exhausted state. They had accomplished nearly 
four hundred miles in twenty-five days, and sustained three severe 
rear-guard combats at Waitzen, Miskolcz, and Gesthely, before 
they disappeared beyond Tokay; and their vanguard, on the 10th, 
had come into conflict with General Schlick's corps as it was 
debouching not far from Arad, and was obliged to fall back with 
great loss upon that fortress. 

Meanwhile M. Kossuth and his Ministers had begun to appre- 
ciate the reality of their situation, when they saw the whole of 
Upper Hungary in the possession of the allied army, and the war 
concentrated beyond the Theiss. The intended effect of Gorgey's 
last manoeuvres to place himself in communication with the 
southern army had been baffled by the prompt and skilful advance 
of General Haynau upon Szegedin ; and a series of disastrous en- 
gagements had clearly intimated to the Provisional Government, 
that their career was drawing to a close. At last (August 11th) 
M. Kossuth abdicated his post of Governor, and the supreme 
authority was transferred to General Gorgey. It is clear beyond 
a doubt that the Provisional Government admitted, on its resigna- 
tion, that they had no further hope of bringing the war to a suc- 
cessful issue. M. Kossuth, in his proclamation to the nation, 
announced for himself, and in the name of all his Ministers, that 
they had laid down the reins of government, having <( no longer 
any hope of carrying on the war with success against the great 
force which the allied Austrians and Russians had brought into 
the field." If M. Kossuth was not sincere in this statement, to 
what motive are we to attribute his abdication at so critical a 
moment? But already before M. Kossuth's retirement, Dem- 
binsky had been defeated at Szareg, Bern had lost a battle 
at Maros-Vasarhely, and both these Generals had been routed 
at Temeswar. The remains of the southern army had then fallen 
back "on Lugos, where, with the exception of Vecsey's corps, 
they were found by M. Kossuth himself in a state of complete 
disorganization, and where Desewffy and Kmety reported to 



THE CONCLUSION OF THE WAR. 87 

him that their troops " would fight no longer, but would disperse 
like chaff at the first shot." To complete the picture, it may 
be added that this army was at that time utterly destitute of 
provisions. 

The battle of Temeswar, which put the seal to General 
Haynau's successful advance, was fought on the 9th of August. 
The Austrians then pressed forward towards Arad, where Schlick, 
as already stated, came into conflict with Gorgey's vanguard,, 
whilst the main army of the Russians was rapidly approaching 
from the north. Gorgey thereupon took the road by Radna to the 
Maros, intending to effect a junction with the army at Lugos ; but 
Haynau, anticipating his movement, dispatched an Austrian 
column to Lippa, which drove back Gorgey's vanguard, that had 
just come up, beyond the river, and forced it to set fire to the 
bridge to secure its retreat. There thus remained no outlet 
for Gorgey in that direction, and he had no line of escape 
open to him into Transylvania, where he would still have had to 
encounter further enemies in the Russian corps of Liiders and the 
Austrian corps of Clam-Gallas. A moment of success might 
have prolonged the struggle for a few days, but it would have en- 
tailed a wanton sacrifice of life. Gorgey thereupon determined 
to capitulate, and with the remains of his army (25,000 men) 
surrendered to the Russian division of General Riidiger on the 
13th of August, at Vilagos. His motives are best explained in 
the words of his letter addressed immediately after the event to 
General Klapka at Comorn : — 

" I am a Hungarian, and love my country above everything else. I 
have hearkened to the voice of my heart, and the inborn yearning to 
procure for my poor and broken country that peace of which it stands 
so much in need, and thus to save it from total destruction. General ! 
this was the motive for my conduct at Vilagos. Posterity will pro- 
nounce its judgment." 

An impartial review of these events leads to no other conclusion 
than that Gorgey's capitulation had become a moral necessity. 
The dangers which the allied army of the Austrians and Russians 
had to fear throughout the campaign were those of the march, not 
of the field ; but the Hungarians themselves had latterly been 
obliged to have recourse to forced requisitions — •" a miserable ex- 



88 HUNGARY. 

pedient," to useM. Kossuth's own words, tc which made the people 
hate thein ;" so that the perils of the road began to press upon 
them more heavily precisely as they became less able to avoid the 
dangers of the field. It was a singular coincidence that the battle 
which decided the fate of the southern army was fought in the 
district where the first shot of the whole war is said to have been 
fired, and almost within sight of the citadel of Temeswar, on 
which the King's standard had never ceased to float. The suc- 
cessful defence of Temeswar is perhaps one of the most glorious 
feats in the annals of European warfare. The garrison obsti- 
nately refused to surrender, although on the hundredth day of the 
siege, when the cellars were no longer safe from the bombs of the 
besiegers, and cholera was carrying off 150 victims daily, Count 
Vecsey, the besieging General, proposed most honourable terms 
of capitulation to the commandant of the fortress. On the very 
next day, the distant booming of artillery announced for the first 
time the neighbourhood of a friendly force; but it was not until 
the hundred and seventh evening of the siege that General 
Haynau, after his victory at Kis Beckskerek, rode into the town, 
and announced to General Rukowina, a grey-haired veteran of 
eighty, that he was relieved. Full time it was that relief to that 
gallant old man should arrive, for the garrison, which had 
amounted to 8659 men at the commencement of the siege — of 
whom 1500 were Magyars, who behaved with the most un- 
flinching fidelity — could at last only muster 1621 men capable of 
bearing arms. The defence of Temeswar was nearly equalled in 
devotedness by the defence of Arad ;* it was hardly surpassed in 
heroism by that of Buda. 

It is a remarkable circumstance that the civil chiefs of the re- 
volution seem never to have fully appreciated the military diffi- 
culties of General Gorgey's position, whilst they were feelingly 
alive to the political difficulties of their own situation, as evinced 
by their abdication; but it might have been expected that a 
retrospective survey would have satisfied them that the cause of 

* General Berger held out Arad during nearly nine months, until, relief being 
utterly hopeless, he surrendered to famine on July 1, 1849. Buda was stormed on 
the 21st of May by Gorgey, after a siege of seventeen days. Its commander, General 
Henzi, and more than 2000 out of a garrison of 4300 men, died upon the walls. 



THE EUROPEAN QUESTION. 89 

the revolution was not abandoned until it had become irretriev- 
able. Such, however, has not proved to be the case; and M. 
Kossuth has not hesitated to announce to his political agents in 
England and France, in a manifesto of 12th September, 1849, 
from Widdin, that Hungary " fell a sacrifice not to the superior 
power of the enemy, but to base treachery ; that he (Kossuth) 
had raised Gorgey from the dust, in order that he might win im- 
perishable renown for himself and freedom for his fatherland, 
whereas he had become Hungary's dastardly hangsman" (henker) ! 
It is difficult to understand how M. Kossuth can have ventured to 
draw so largely upon the credulity of Western Europe. His 
assertions indeed have induced the writer of these remarks to 
study with more care than he otherwise should have done the 
conduct of General Gorgey throughout the war, and his relations 
with the Provisional Government; and he has been led to the 
conclusion that the facts would rather warrant the historian to say 
of Gorgey, " Vicit ergo Hannibalem non populus Romanus toties 
caesus fugatusque, sed Senatus Carthaginiensis obtrectatione et 
invidia." The mortification of exile and imprisonment may possibly 
account for such odious incriminations, and for such an exagge- 
ration of the Magyar practice of recording a protest after defeat. 

The European Question. 

Let us now inquire what was the European significance of this 
war. It has been said that the dethronement of the House of 
Hapsburg- Lorraine, and the dismemberment of the Empire, had 
become a necessity for Hungary, as well as for the other countries 
under the Imperial sceptre, and that the general interests of 
Europe demanded the establishment of an independent Hungary, 
and, as a corollary of this, an independent Poland, and an inde- 
pendent Illyrian kingdom, which should comprise all the Scla- 
vonic races between the Danube and the Adriatic. States, how- 
ever, like Poland, which have perished by a process of internal 
decay, can never be recalled to life. Napoleon was loath to 
renounce the task ; but on his return to Paris, after the campaign 
of 1807, he thus expressed himself to a living French statesman : — 

G 



90 



HUNGARY. 



" Ne croyez-vous pas que j'aurais retabli la Pologne, si j'en avais 
vu la possibility, mais on ne retablit point un pays qui s'est 
perdu de cette maniere pitoyable : a moins," he added, " que les 
causes de sa dissolution ont ete changees depuis." The facts of 
history are further opposed, in many respects, to the possibility 
of such a political combination; and the tendency of Hungary 
herself, at different epochs and under different conditions, to 
renounce the state of isolation to which the success of the ultra- 
Magyar ideas would have condemned her, is too remarkable to 
be overlooked. It suggests a presumption of some necessity 
founded on her geographical requirements, which she has en- 
deavoured instinctively to obey. During the reigns of the twelve 
monarchs of the mixed period, who intervened between the last 
male prince of the race of Arpad and Ferdinand of Hapsburg, 
the Crown of Hungary was invariably united with a second or 
even a third Crown, except in the solitary instance of Matthias 
Corvinus, who made every effort, though in vain, to accomplish 
the very union which the House of Austria subsequently realised. 
The reason of this is obvious. The countries which compose 
the Empire of the House of Austria have a common character, 
so far as they occupy the debateable ground between the Eastern 
and the Western nationalities of Europe. Hungary as well as 
Bohemia, Styria as well as the Tyrol, Carinthia as well as Mo- 
ravia, are peopled with inhabitants of various races, which, if 
left to themselves, would struggle with one another for the mas- 
tery, without any one of them being sufficiently strong to control 
the others by superior physical force, or superior intellectual 
culture : but when they are united with other countries, in which 
the mixture of races, though analogous, is in different proportions, 
they mutually balance one another. The dissolution of the Aus- 
trian monarchy, on the plea of the incompatibility of its nationalities, 
would entail not merely a series of civil wars, but a warfare of ex- 
termination. The experience of events in the late Hungarian war 
ought to preclude scepticism on this head. In Transylvania the 
Wallachian peasantry rose against the Magyar proprietors. It 
was not merely a Jacquerie, as in Galicia — a war of class against 
class, but also a war of race against race, and the excesses of both 



THE EUROPEAN QUESTION. 91 

parties were terrible. Again, in the Banat, the granary of Hun- 
gary,, the Serbs made war against the Magyars and Germans 
indiscriminately, whether they were the friends of the King or 
oi the Magyar government, of order or of the revolution, and entire 
villages have disappeared before their ravages. If the political 
links which hold together the inheritance of the House of Austria 
are to be snapped asunder, and the dominion of a single race 
is to be substituted for the dominion of a common interest, it 
will be found that there is no nationality sufficiently strong to 
impose its supremacy on its neighbours. If we turn to the 
Magyar nationality, we find it compact, full of political strength 
and experience, but too feeble in point of numbers, and not suffi- 
ciently advanced in general culture. Hence M. Wesselenyi, in 
his pamphlet entitled ' Szozat' (A Voice), and even M. Kossuth 
himself, frequently declared the necessity of fortifying the Magyar 
with the German element. If we look to the German nationality, 
we find it highly civilised, but certainly in the rear as respects 
political life, and numerically too weak. If we regard the Scla- 
vonic nationalities, we find them fragmentary and dispersed, sepa- 
rated at great intervals from one another, rich perhaps in the 
promise of future years, but not as yet ripe in the qualities which 
fit nations for actual sovereignty. With such results apparent 
on the surface of things, it would be a rash venture to cast the 
vessel adrift, and embark on a sea without a haven. But though 
many modifications may be in store for a state composed of such 
varied elements as the Austrian monarchy, though many changes 
may take place in her centre of equilibrium, according to the 
development of the constituent parts of that monarchy, thus much 
is certain, that, if they are to prove permanent and beneficial, they 
will be the result of slow growth and gradual transformation, not 
of arbitrary caprice or violent convulsion. The friends of Hungary 
rejoiced a few years ago at the rapid yet steady advancement of 
her material prosperity; they began to believe that a youthful 
state was growing up in the valley of the Danube, which in time 
would rival, if not outshine, her imperial sister. But in a moment 
of impatience the Magyar race overshot its mark. It sought to 
realise in a day that which could only be achieved with safety in 




92 HUNGARY. 

the course of years, and it became the dupe of an enthusiast, 
whose system was without a basis, whose ability as a statesman was 
totally unequal to the task upon which he ventured, but whose 
talents for political agitation, and power of fanatieising the masses 
by his eloquence, have, unhappily for the welfare of a high-spirited 
and brave people, been rarely, if ever, surpassed. 



PRINTED BY W. CLOWES AND SONS, STAMFORD STREET. 



HUNGARY: 



ITS CONSTITUTION AND ITS CATASTROPHE. 
By COEVINUS. 



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